We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Cody watches toy-based action and a Valentine slasher.
SNAKE EYES: G.I. JOE ORIGINS (2021)
A movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line that centers on Snake Eyes, who may be the single most popular G.I. Joe character, should have been an easy project to turn into a smash hit. All they had to do was take this silent, black-clad ninja character on a rousing martial arts adventure. Unfortunately, director Robert Schwentke and screenwriters Evan Spiliotopoulos, Anna Waterhouse, and Joe Shrapnel (who sounds like a G.I. Joe himself) largely forgot to deliver the “rousing adventure” part of the formula and made the error of keeping Snake Eyes out of his iconic costume until the final moments of the movie. The climactic battle should have been between Snake Eyes and his white-clad ninja frenemy Storm Shadow, but apparently they were saving that visual for a sequel. Which we’re never going to get because Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins was a box office failure, making just $40 million at the box office on a budget that may have climbed above $100 million. Word is that this movie lost Paramount Pictures $80 million.
The “Origins” subtitle is part of the problem. The Snake Eyes fans know and love is a mystery. All we really know about him is that he served in the military alongside his pal Tommy Arashikage, was horribly disfigured along the way (and also lost the use of his vocal cords), and was then invited by Tommy to train in the ways of the ninja as part of the Arashikage clan, an ancient ninja society. Snake Eyes and Tommy, a.k.a. Storm Shadow, go on to have a complicated relationship. Sometimes Storm Shadow is in the international peacekeeping organization G.I. Joe with Snake Eyes, sometimes he’s part of the terrorist group Cobra, fighting against the G.I. Joes. This movie not only makes Snake Eyes an unmasked, speaking character (he’s played by Henry Golding), but also gives him an all-new back story.
Here we learn that Snake Eyes was the son of a G.I. Joe operative who was tracked down and murdered by a Cobra agent who made him roll a pair of dice to decide his fate. The dice came up “snake eyes”, which is why the kid decides to use that name when he grows up and starts participating in underground fights. From this criminal scene, he’s recruited by Yakuza gun runner Kenta (Takehiro Hira), who offers to find his father’s killer if he does some unsavory things for him. That includes befriending Kenta’s cousin Tommy (Andrew Koji) and infiltrating the Arashikage ninja clan that Tommy is part of but Kenta has been banned from and wants to take control of. To gain the trust of the clan, Snake Eyes is put through trials by the likes of Hard Master (Iko Uwais), Blind Master (Peter Mensah), and Akiko (Haruka Abe). And while the scope of the story will eventually expand to involve Cobra representative Baroness (Úrsula Corberó), G.I. Joe representative Major Scarlett O’Hara (Samara Weaving), and a powerful item called the Jewel of the Sun, which is hidden away in the Arashikage compound, the bursts of action didn’t save Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins from being, overall, a very dull viewing experience for me.
I shouldn’t have been feeling restless while watching a Snake Eyes movie, I should have been having a blast watching the ninja action. But the movie just trudged through its 2 hour running time, sticking us with a guy who wasn’t anything like the Snake Eyes we turned up to see.
VALENTINE (2001)
There’s a cheesiness to director Jamie Blanks’ 1998 slasher Urban Legend that made the movie somewhat off-putting to me. I could watch it and enjoy it, but I didn’t like it as much as its teen horror contemporaries like Scream, Scream 2, I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and The Faculty. Blanks brought that cheesiness back full force on the slasher he made a couple years later, Valentine. So this is another movie I can get some enjoyment of when I watch it, but I don’t feel compelled to go back to it very often.
The story – based on a novel by Tom Savage that was then fleshed out into a screenplay by Gretchen J. Berg, Aaron Harberts, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers – begins at a Valentine’s Day dance at a junior high school in 1988. An unpopular young boy named Jeremy Melton asks a bunch of popular girls to dance. He gets rudely shot down by Shelley, Lily, and Paige. He gets a “maybe later” from Kate. And he gets acceptance from Dorothy, he even goes so far as to make out with him under the bleachers. But when they get caught kissing, Dorothy ruins Jeremy’s life by accusing him of sexual assault. The kid gets beaten up by a group of his peers, then sent off to reform school.
Jump ahead thirteen years and – just in time for Valentine’s Day – a blade-wielding killer in a cherub mask starts stalking and slashing his way through Jeremy’s former classmates: Katherine Heigl as Shelley, Jessica Cauffiel as Lily, Denise Richards as Paige, Jessica Capshaw as Dorothy, and Marley Shelton as Kate... and since Kate was always the nicest of the bunch, she quickly emerges as the heroine of the film. But the cherub-masked killer doesn’t just target the girls who Jeremy asked to dance. He’ll kill anyone who crosses his path while he’s stalking the girls, whether it be a boyfriend of one of the girls or a creepy neighbor who breaks into a girl’s apartment.
Valentine is at its best when the cherub is on the screen. There are some great attack sequences here; one involving a power drill and a hot tub. My favorite comes right up front, when the cherub goes after med student Shelley while she’s working in the morgue. Trying to escape from the cherub, Shelley ends up in a room full of corpses in body bags. When the cherub enters the room, Shelley is nowhere to be seen... so he’s quickly able to deduce that she is hiding in one of the body bags. He opens the first couple, then takes an easier approach to figuring out whether the body in a bag is alive or not. He just walks down the rows of corpses, stabbing each bagged body he passes. It’s one of the most Michael Myers-esque moves I’ve ever seen a non-Myers slasher pull off.
The character scenes between the cherub sequences are a bumpy ride for me to endure, with Lifetime movie atmosphere and cringe-inducing attempts at humor. Like moments with the aforementioned creepy neighbor. And a scene where the water in Kate’s apartment stops working when she’s mid-shower and she decides to finish washing her hair in the toilet bowl. So in the name of humor we get a scene where the heroine of the film looks like an idiot, getting on her knees and dipping her head into a toilet bowl instead of using the clean water from the toilet tank to wash her hair.
Valentine is quite dumb at times. The slasher is cool, though.
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