G.I. Joe: Retaliation - Sheer disappointment

Cast: Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, Adrianne Palicki, Ray Park, Jonathan Pryce and Lee Byung-hun 

Running Time: Approx 1 hour 45 minutes


Dear Friends,

First of all belated happy holi to all of you. I hope this holi would have brought lots of joy in your life. For me it was an opportunity to break the routine and so I broke it by playing with small quantity of colors with my family after a gap of more than decade and it was indeed a happy surprise for them and in turn I felt happy too. Happiness is so infectious but obviously it should be of your loved ones not enemies :). Happiness of enemies is infectious too but in bad way.

Coming to the movie, sorry in advance for spamming the mailboxes of all those who are not fan of action movies. This weekend 2 major movies got released; I required to be super duper himmatwala to bear Sajid Khan's Himmatwala and even in my worst mental condition I can not think of watching that.The other movie which got released was much awaited movie for me. Here much awaited means I have been waiting for one year as the movie was earlier planned to be released in 2012 which was delayed till end of march 2013 to convert it into 3D. I liked the action in prequel G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and expected this to have at least same amount of action if not more than that.

Initially I planned to watch it with my friend in Noida in 3D but as an integral bad dream of software engineer's life, he got some production issues to spend his whole day with.I asked always ready to be my partner in crime; my brother to accompany me and thankfully he agreed this time also. As usual we were late again in entering the cinema hall so missed the first 5 minutes :(. Hope I did not miss much of it.

I have this problem while watching the sequels and you might be having the same problem too. As soon as movie starts, comparison started with prequel and my mind tried scene by scene mapping; expecting some similar level of action to begin. Though director of this part was different (Jon M. Chu; Director of Step up movies), he followed the same route. War sequence in start of prequel was matched with war sequence here too, though unexpectedly one major character of movie died in this.

You might have read or heard or experienced before also that English action movies are dumb and are mostly without story but this movie is an exception. This is much much dumber. I do not expect action movies to have any great mind boggling story but atleast for god sake there should be something which can keep the interest alive. If there is no story then I expect continuous action sequences but unfortunately if I leave bits and pieces of action, real action started after one hour of start and ended within 5 minutes.
This was one spectacular never seen before fight scene of samurais on the mountains of Himalayas. This is the only scene which I wished I could have seen in 3D. 

As there is no story so there is nothing to reveal. G.I. Joe is special team of USA for special missions which got destroyed as planned by team of antagonists by using political power as weapon. Survivors of G.I. Joe team regrouped and save the world by fighting with villains.

Movie kept on moving slowly without any story with some twists which were unexpected and unwanted. If you have seen and remember the prequel, one of the most enjoyed part was fighting scenes of Snake eyes and Storm shadow and here when they become one team it meant all that fighting got missed :(. Characters were half developed and every scene seems to be borrowed from mission impossible and die hard series. Only one actor impressed, Jonathan Pryce playing the role of Zartan disguised as president of USA. He was really excellent in his dialogue delivery. Bruce Willis was more of a guest appearance and in absence of any main character, it can be painfully assumed that Dwayne Johnson aka Rock was the main protagonist of movie. Adrianne Palicki tried hard to look glamorous but she looked quite older than her age of 30 years. 

After crawling without any objective for around 1 hour and 30 minutes, when in the end villain's main objective came up there was no surprise. If there are no aliens in English movie then one of the 2 things remain; Virus/chemical weapon or nuclear weapons. Chemical weapon was used in first installment so there is no award for guessing the central objective of this one. Yes, you need not be a Nobel prize winner to guess that once again Nuclear weapon is the idea which story writers have come up with. Only creativity is that they thought of using satellites launching the weapons.

In the climax, I waited for any one of the characters to press the stop button at the last moment to stop the destruction of world and yesss we were going to be destroyed yet saved again by USA. I must applaud the writers to give a very good message as a part of climax that whole world is sitting on the heap of nuclear weapons and buttons are lying in the hands of corrupt and illiterate politicians and slight laziness or foolishness of them can destroy whole countries or even humanity. But decision is in the hand of the authorities and average movie goer like me cannot do anything and this movie was so much below average that no one will notice this.

Finally, I will say that you can avoid this movie and only in one situation can watch this if you want to watch any movie with your friends this weekend and want to save your mind from torture of watching 
HIMMATWALA :). Too much bashing for Sajid Khan but he deserves that for this movie :).


Thanks for reading. Keep smiling.