In short: Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (2021)

As regular readers know, I have a high tolerance for modern blockbuster movies and their specific foibles. Still, I have no problem judging this one to be one of the more pointless pieces of overbudgeted crap I’ve encountered in my time.

Apparently, Hasbro is hankering after its own Hasbro Cinematic Universe (stop laughing!), and decided to start it with…an origins spin-off about a popular G.I. Joe character. Directed by Robert Schwentke, director of completely personality-free and nearly painfully mediocre highish budget mush like R.I.P.D. and RED. And indeed, Schwentke here continues to show a complete lack of personality or style as a director, not exactly doing much wrong on a technical level, but never doing anything right or just interesting either. He’s also really great at getting disinterested performances out of perfectly decent actors, like everyone in this one’s cast.

Clearly, you don’t want to start out your Hasbroverse with anything that’s entertaining or even vaguely ambitious.

The film does remind me of the terrible first Wolverine movie in Fox’s X-Men universe a lot more than of anything Marvel has put out, in that its script consists exclusively of clichés anybody in the market for this kind of film will have seen used better in a hundred other films, dragged out interminably. Worse, it really wants to have all of the clichés, and so trundles off in twelve different directions, one after the other. There, the film finds nothing of interest but certainly uses every opportunity to slow things down to a crawl, and turn about seventy minutes of usable stuff into a two hour movie that never seems to end.

It also suffers from an inexplicable need to explain any old nonsense about Snake Eyes, though, admittedly, there’s nothing in here quite as pointless as the origin of Wolverine’s leather jacket. On the other hand, Wolverine’s leather jacket never decided that a stone that spits a bit of fire is a horrible super weapon, unlike this one.

On the plus side, the Hasbroverse can only get more interesting after Snake Eyes, if it survives a first outing quite this lacking in personality and reason to exist.

Three Films Make A Post: Jack Mason knows he's going to die someday. But today he's not in the mood.

R.I.P.D. (2013): Well, for what feels like a conscious attempt to recreate the old buddy cop action movie formula, but with undead cops working for the guys up top, Robert Schwentke’s film is certainly entertaining enough. It does try a bit too hard to catch the Men in Black magic in a bottle. So as not to be confused with Tommy Lee Jones, Jeff Bridges rolls out a humanly understandable version of his cowboy dialect again (which is inherently funny, though not as funny as in True Grit because that one isn’t a comedy) and Ryan Reynolds is a very pale Will Smith. Unfortunately, the film’s effects look too cartoony and weightless and its design sense is not terribly sharp. But about half of its jokes are funny, Bridges is Bridges, Kevin Bacon makes an acceptably slimy bad guy, and it isn’t generally boring, so for this type of fantasy/horror/cop/action comedy, it’s a perfectly acceptable film.

Trash Fire (2016): This one, about a dysfunctional couple (Adrian Grenier and Angela Trimbur) visiting the guy’s estranged grandma (Fionnula Flanagan) and disfigured sister (AnnaLynne McCord) so he can become less of a total asshole and get over his perfectly horrible childhood and encountering more than they bargained for, is one of those films I wish I liked more. Director/writer Richard Bates Jr. certainly has a sure hand when it comes to pacing, is able to make a film that mostly takes place in a single home always look interesting, and has a sharp ear for blackly humorous dialogue; the acting is top notch by everyone involved; and technically, there’s no flaw on screen (well, I’m sceptical anyone would not see there’s a rattlesnake hidden away in the toilet bowl). However, I never did find myself emotionally involved in these characters, which can come with the territory of a film in which everyone is a complete asshole (or worse). I’m not asking for people with a traumatic past to be easy audience stand-ins or anything that simple, but watching the film, I always found myself at a distance to everyone on screen, which becomes a problem once the film really wants me to care.


Spellcaster (1988): This Empire production directed by Rafal Zielinski is one of the lesser known Charles Band productions, and for once, it’s a well deserved obscurity, for despite a nice enough castle for what it laughingly calls its plot (a bunch of idiots are searching for a million dollar cheque in a castle belonging to Satan as non-performed by Adam Ant for five minutes) to take place in, and some neat John Buechler effects in the final twenty minutes or so, most of the film is boring and bland. Zielinski seems to never have encountered the concept we call atmosphere, the pacing is sluggish, the characters are bland, and for about an hour or so, little to keep one awake goes on on screen. While things pick up a little for the final act, at that point, I was already half lulled to sleep by scenes upon scenes dull people saying dull shit, and mildly confused by the film permanently hinting at doing something sleazy to keep its audience awake but always pulling back before anything can actually happen. That doesn’t just go for nudity but for all other kinds of excitement, too.