'Snake Eyes' Takes on 'Space Jam' and 'Black Widow'
by EG
The GI Joe prequel Snake Eyes is going to leap into theaters this weekend and pick a fight with two movies that are already battling for ticket dollars. Space Jam: A New Legacy and Black Widow, the top movies of the last two weekends, are still around, and Old, a new movie from M. Night Shyamalan will be there, too. Read on for details.
Via The AV Club.
Snake Eyes (Henry Golding) is a walking, talking origin story. He’s a cipher with only a boilerplate inciting incident to his name, which of course that incident handily yet nonsensically explains. The nickname comprises much of his personality; the rest is his nagging thirst for vengeance against the man who killed his father. Like his fellow just-barely-anti-hero Wolverine, Snake Eyes spends time as a drifter and gets tangled up with the yakuza in Japan. Unlike Wolverine, this character is difficult to picture as part of a bigger, grander adventure. Despite its subtitle, it would be easy enough to forget what, exactly, Snake Eyes is supposed to be prequelizing, if not for an innocent question that comes over an hour into the movie: “So what’s the deal with Cobra?”
Ah, there’s that subtitle: It’s G.I. Joe Origins, and it explains Snake’s rootlessness. He’s filling in backstory for a character who didn’t speak during his appearances in a couple of movies that came out nearly a decade ago, based on a toy line whose popularity peaked well before that. Somehow, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins not only exists but also heads into movie theaters at a time when plenty of big-budget productions have absconded for streaming. The director, Robert Schwentke, made the first Red and a couple of divergents. All together, this might make Snake Eyes the world’s first 2014 nostalgia object.
As nostalgia, Snake Eyes feels like a failure, inspiring wistfulness about neither the mildly successful past films nor the Saturday morning culture that inspired them. (More devoted fans of the old cartoon series may disagree.) However, as a movie about hordes of ninjas drawing their swords and running at each other, it is a notable success. “New threats call for new strategies,” one character helpfully explains, and it’s true: The filmmakers bravely strategize against the threat of shameless franchise extensions not having enough ninjas.
Get the rest of the review at The AV Club.