FILMS OF 2021: SNAKE EYES

SNAKE EYES G.I. JOE ORIGINS

I went to see this today, not too sure why. Perhaps a break from the drawing.

I think it was a film, but I'm not too sure. Maybe it was cutscenes from a video game spliced together. To while away the running time I played guess the next line of dialogue and awarded myself a bonus by successfully predicting the very last line of the film. I scored about 80 points in total, that's five for every correct line and 10 for the last line.

The plot saw some kid witness the execution of his dad and embark on a revenge quest for justice, the kid earns the nickname Snake Eyes and spends the next 20 years getting the living shit kicked out of him in cage fights and gutting tuna fish, which earns him his second nickname of Fish Boy.

Fish Boy gets hired by a Yakuza boss and when he refuses an order to kill somebody called Tommy he ends up recruited by and ultimately working for Tommy who turns out to be the heir to a vast crime syndicate in Japan. Fish Boy gets flown to Japan and ends up training to be a ninja for the heir, but secretly he's working for the Yakuza boss. Apparently there's some crystal or something that the Yakuza boss wants, which Tommy's clan guards, oh and there's this terrorist group called Cobra who want it too.

Oh, but there's also this group called the G.I. Joes who want to stop everyone naughty from doing anything bad.

There's lots of shaky-cam, furious-cutting fighting with lots of swords and knives and a body count in the high hundreds, but without a single drop of blood, making the 'film' a 12A, cos kids need to see as much violent consequence-free killing as possible.

The cast is rather good, the film is mostly set in Japan so it looks good but the rest of this film is just bland, dull and utterly pointless and un-engaging, there are huge sections of this film which are just fight scenes, which because of the fore-mentioned shaky cam and fast editing are rendered unwatchable. Oh and all the fight scenes take place either at dusk, or darkest night.

I finally drifted off into blissful sleep for about 20 minutes, then woke up and just sort of let the rest of the film wash over me. By the end of it, Fish Boy gets given his G.I. Joe battle suit, and Tommy and him are now mortal enemies.

All that said, if you had a gun put to your head and you were ordered to chose a film to watch between Fast and Furious 9 and this, I'd go for this one.

I'd give this a resounding 4/10 cos I really like Henry Golding, he deserves far better than this.