Released: July 2021
Director: Robert Schwentke
Rated PG-13
Run Time: 121 Minutes
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Genre: Action
Cast:
Henry Golding: Snake Eyes
Andrew Koji: Tommy
Haruke Abe: Akiko
Takehiro Hira: Kenta
Iko Uwais: Hard Master
Peter Mensah: Blind Master
Ursula Corbero: Baroness
Samara Weaving: Scarlett
It’s a general rule of thumb that ninjas are awesome. It doesn’t matter if they show up in the day or at night. Ninjas. Are. Awesome. While ninjas have shown up in movies since the 60s, they really hit their peak in the 80s with movies like Enter The Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, Pray for Death, and American Ninja. You can thank the popularity of ninjas during the 1980s because of one man: Sho Kosugi. He’s played both good and evil ninjas and he was one of the best action stars to come out of Japan at that time. That didn’t mean that those ninja movies were good. Most of them weren’t. But I’ll be damned if they weren’t fun. But the ninja movie disappeared after the 90s. I’m not exaggerating, the popularity of those kinds of movies just dropped like a rock, and we wouldn’t see our first ninja on film until The Last Samurai, and that was only for about 5-6 minutes. After that, we got Ninja Assassin in 2009, which was a lot of fun, and a Scott Adkins-led Ninja, which had its moments, but wasn’t that great. The follow-up, Ninja: Shadow of A Tear was a much better movie. But other movies also had ninjas, namely G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Those ninjas went by the name of Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. Snake Eyes was clad entirely in black while Storm Shadow was dressed in white. Snake Eyes was played by Darth Maul himself, Ray Park and Storm Shadow was played by Korean star Byung-Hun Lee. The less said about the first film, the better. I enjoyed Retaliation quite a bit more. The problem with those movies was that best parts involved Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. The rivalry between those two characters was outstanding. So, eight years later, we get a NEW G.I Joe film, Snake Eyes(not to be confused with the Nicolas Cage movie of the same name).
Snake Eyes follows the title character as he witnesses the murder of his father as a child. He grows up hunting the man who murdered his father when he’s offered a job by the head of a Yakuza gang. After saving the life of Tommy, who is a member of a local ninja clan, Snake Eyes is recruited by the clan to help defend Japan against any who threaten it. As I mentioned in my introduction, the best parts of the G.I. Joe movies was Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. This is an origin story of not just Snake Eyes but Storm Shadow as well. It shows their relationship when they were brothers-in-arms to when they end up on opposite sides. The relationship between the two characters really has been at the heart of the previous movies, but this movie actually explores that in detail, and in that regard, the movie works. However, the story surrounding them isn’t very good. It IS an origin story, and quite frankly, I think people have had enough of those. Not only that, things happen in this movie that make you question people’s motives. Ultimately, it’s just a reason to see two ninjas going to town on bad guys with swords and guns.
There’s two aspects of this film that knee-cap this movie completely, and these aspects are the most important parts of the film: The writing, the characters, and the action. I’m going to discuss the writing and the characters first. For a movie called Snake Eyes, it goes out of its way to make you hate the lead character. I’m not kidding. Snake Eyes is a total jack-ass. I’m not blaming Henry Golding for it. He’s fantastic, but his character is poorly written. This guy is clearly out for revenge and he’s willing to screw over his allies to get what he wants. More than once. Every time you think he has a change of heart, he goes against the clan and betrays Tommy on multiple occasions. I’m sorry, how are you supposed to sympathize with a character that’s more than willing to betray his allies for a chance at revenge? In fact, the movie makes it clear that Tommy, who will become Storm Shadow, is the one that the audience should be siding with. This is a fundamental failure of the script and its writers to craft a compelling lead character. Every other character in the film is paper-thin. We don’t get to learn any more about Hard Master or Blind Master, and we certainly don’t learn a whole lot about Akiko. Since this is supposed to be a G.I. Joe movie, where are Cobra and the Joes? With the exception of the Baroness and Scarlett, those organizations are given barely more than lip-service, and even those two characters aren’t that important. In fact, you could remove Baroness and Scarlett, and you wouldn’t lose anything from the movie. At all. That’s how pointless they are. As you can probably tell, I hate the writing in this movie. It’s abysmal.
Since this is a G.I. Joe movie that involves ninjas, you would think the action would be spectacular, right? Right? Not entirely. The fight choreography here is actually really good, when you can see it. For reasons that escape me, the director and the director of photography opted for shaky-cam instead of making it…I don’t know, easy to see. The camera-work is not the worst I’ve seen in a movie like this, but it really does get in the way of being to see what these guys are truly capable of in terms of staging the action. When you can see it, it’s fantastic, especially towards the end of the film. It’s weird because Bojan Bazelli, the DP, is usually really good about letting the audience see what’s going on in most of his movies. Robert Schwentke, the director, is clearly not experienced in shooting close-quarters combat with swords. The guy that did the fight choreography, Kenji Tanigaki, knows what he’s doing. He’s done outstanding work in movies like Rurouni Kenshin, Enter the Fat Dragon, and Wuxia(Dragon). The car chases and stunt sequences are all really good, but again, the camera-work gets in the way. People really need to stop looking at the Bourne movies for how to shoot fight scenes. You only do shaky-cam when you want to hide bad choreography, but I didn’t see any bad choreography here. Just bad angles and close-ups…and shakiness.
In terms of acting, everybody does a pretty good job, but the two standouts are Henry Golding as Snake Eyes and Andrew Koji as Tommy. You really do buy into the friendship that these two have which becomes a rivalry. Iko Uwais is completely under-used as Hard Master, and that sucks, because Uwais is a hell of a martial artist and actor. Peter Mensah is great as Blind Master, but again, he’s not given a whole lot to chew on. The main villain of the movie, Kenta, is your run-of-the-mill outcast that feels betrayed by the clan that he was a part of. While Takehiro Hira does what he can with what he’s given, the character is incredibly thin, and the motivation for the character isn’t anything more than taking revenge. Yay? Samara Weaving is totally wasted here. She’s a fantastic actress, but her character of Scarlett is only there to provide exposition and occasionally fight. There’s no depth, no motivation, and the character is incredibly bland. The same thing goes for Ursula Corbero’s Baroness. Baroness is supposed to be the right-hand woman of Cobra Commander, but not only do we not see HIM at all, but her motivations are also flimsy. It’s like the writers didn’t even try to make these characters have any kind of depth.
Is Snake Eyes a bad movie? It’s not entirely without merit, but it is not a good movie, and to be honest, I don’t think people were really excited for it. It sets up for further adventures, but the likelihood of that happening is slim-to-none. First of all, G.I. Joe hasn’t been popular since the 80s, so most people really weren’t interested. On top of that, this movie was also released during a global pandemic, so the box-office intake was much less than it would have been if it was released during normal times, but even then, I feel it would’ve bombed. It’s just not that good. I understand that Paramount and the film-makers were attempting to reboot the franchise and start a new cinematic universe, but if your first movie isn’t good enough, a cinematic universe just isn’t going to happen. Look at what happened with 2017’s The Mummy. Besides, not everything needs to have a cinematic universe. Marvel got away with it, because they smart about it, and made sure Iron Man was the best movie it could be before moving on from that. So, yeah, Snake Eyes isn’t terrible, but there were some really bad decisions made here, especially in terms of the action. If they had made the action more watchable with less shaky-cam, this would’ve been a more passable action flick. As it stands, it does nothing to improve on any of the other movies. Besides, I prefer Ray Park as Snake Eyes, anyway.