Control Review: Snake Eyes

I, Dalton Lewis, hereby review Snake Eyes: GI Joe: Origins. If you want to watch a fun action movie with ninjas you might like this movie — even if it is considered a critical and commercial failure. It opens 20 years ago with a young boy and his father in the woods. There is a family tragedy, as there often is in such stories, and then we flip twenty years into the future — when Snake Eyes is fighting in cage matches with burly men and winning brutal fights to win betting money. He always wins.

A member of the yakuza offers him crucial information in exchange for his loyalty. He takes the deal and starts to smuggle guns until he is told to murder someone. This person, Tommy, turns out to be an innocent ninja investigating the yakuza. Snake Eyes saves Tommy and they fight to safety. Tommy invites Snake Eyes to join his ninja clan, the Arashikage. He begins to study to become a ninja and join the family and fight bad guys for them. Loyalties are tested, ninja rituals occur, and many characters fight each other, for simulation or to the death.

The criminal organization known as Cobra shows up and fights to deliver weapons and find a terrible weapon which will provide a crucial asset to their goals of global terror. Their agent, the Baroness, is intent on helping the yakuza break the ninjas. A separate group wants to help the good guys: the Joes, a group of good guys intent on, well, doing superhero work. Snake Eyes and Tommy must navigate which side they are on — and characters switch sides quickly and often.

I liked the movie, but I often like movies. I try to stay positive in my blog’s reviews. This movie contains martial arts action and a lot of it. It contains some interesting rituals, I suppose, and the characters seem to care about each other — which is something. There isn’t any strong dramatic conflict except a simple revenge plot in which someone had Snake Eye’s dad killed — and he will hate the enemy who did that, no questions asked.

That’s the situation: there is dramatic conflict in which many characters struggle with a seemingly easy question: Joes or Cobra. The answer seems obvious, but many characters choose Cobra during various parts of the movie, and I found that to be pretty interesting. I liked the way the characters were not simply all the Joes against all the Cobras — how so many characters struggled with the decision of which side to choose. I especially liked Tommy’s arc as he struggled to give everything he had to a ninja clan only to see that clan struggle.

There’s no real big romance in this story, but that’s okay by me. There are several big fight sequences and a lot of scenes of characters trying to evaluate each other — if they can be trusted. Trust is a commodity in this movie, and no one can be counted on to trust anyone at any time.

I’m not sure if they can come up with a GI Joe connected universe — given the weak box office of this movie. Let’s be honest. This is a hardworking, well-constructed failure of a movie. It didn’t win a very weak opening weekend. M. Night Shyamalan beat it with his worst opening movie of all time — a movie about growing old. That beat this movie. When I bought my ticket no one else had bought a ticket yet — and only four of us watched the movie, all guys.

This was a well-meaning, well-constructed miss. Good effort, Henry Golding. I wish you luck with your further outings, but this one is a swing and a miss. It’s a good movie which is a failure that is being ignored — but one that I enjoyed watching. I had fun.

Thanks, and take care, friends.