okay, this one just might work
People who know me understand that historically, I’ve been a fan of the modern GI:JOE franchise; I own almost the entire run of the 80s Marvel comics series, including a copy of issue #1 signed by both writer Larry Hama and penciler Herb Trimpe. I spent my tween years watching the cartoons and collecting the toys. I’ve got the original “Cobra-lalala” movie on DVD.
That said, the live action Joe movie from a couple of years ago was mostly just okay. It captured a lot of the over-the-top-ness of the cartoon series and such pretty well, and drew nicely from Hama’s comic series for the Snake-Eyes/Storm Shadow dynamic and the Destro backstory. But, it suffered a bit from poor casting and some serious liberties with the characters’ history.
However, it was popular enough to warrant a sequel, with a few casting upgrades and what looks like a lot of the fat cut. They released a trailer today for GI:JOE: Retailiation, and despite the abuse of colons, it looks pretty bad-ass:
It looks like it’s stripping things down a bit, and, in a not-entirely-unwelcome turn, looks like they’ve killed off the wooden Channing Tatum as “Duke” in the trailer. This is probably a good move.
Of course, the genius move would be to close the movie with a hastily-added voice over stating that they “Just talked to Doc, and Duke’s going to be A-OK!”, because that, you know, would be a brilliant inside baseball reference to one of the most infamous moments in Joe history.
It appears, however, that The Rock’s “Roadblock” isn’t going to be delivering all his lines in rhyming couplets, so such a move is, admittedly, unlikely.
More’s the pity.
