Snake Eyes and Black Widow

Movies with black clad protagonists!

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

More talkative, makes less sense.

When someone kills his dad, Snake Eyes (Henry Golding) dedicates his entire life to vengeance at any cost. This involves betraying a number of people many times and killing a lot of other people -because they were in his way- out of self defense *cough*. There are some nice action scenes (I particularly enjoyed the ones with Iko Uwais) but there are loads of over the top ones too.

It's one of those flicks where most of the bad guys keep forgetting to bring firearms and the only surprise in the plot is that they remembered to somehow link in G.I. Joe and Cobra to it, because if you don't see the title you can watch most of it without knowing it was a GI Joe flick. Anyway, this isn't something that I'd watch again or recommend and give it two disguise sheets out of five.

That would have been a twist!

Black Widow

Takes place after Captain America: Civil War.

Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) has no problem being in hiding due to her stance on the Sokovia Accords, but she doesn't actually get much downtime as a surprise mission comes up that involves reuniting with her "family". There are a few flash back segments to establish this newly revealed past and the story, humor and action segments are quite good. I do have to question Natasha's resilience though as some damage she takes during this film makes me wonder if she too took the super soldier serum.

Definitely a flick for Avenger or Scarlett fans, and one I'd watch again. I give this "passing the torch" three tight fitting suits out of five. It's pretty telling that whatever the next threat the entire Avengers team will need to face, whenever that rolls around there's going to be a drastically different line up based on what's happening in the MCU series as well.

GI JOE: Rise and Retaliation

This is a double review for the GI JOE movies which I'm putting together for ease of comparison.

In "Rise of the Cobra" an arms dealer with a score to settle sets in motion a spree of violent attacks and general terrorism on the world. Good thing the elite fighting force known as the GI Joes are there to save the day. The plot mainly follows Duke (Channing Tatum) as he first learns about both Cobra (the bad guys) and the Joes, the latter of which he joins after an "intense" training/testing montage. Part of his training involves some super futuristic body armor that for some reason IS ONLY USED BY THE NEW GUYS. What? There's also a shooting test which seems to be pretty tough to pass. The Joes only take the best you see. Guess they had a lull in recruitment at one point since all the non-named Joes can't hit a barn door.

Not as colorful as their cartoon counterparts.

Cobra on the other hand have awesome bullet proof armor and freaking energy weapons. Too bad that the armor only protects them against the weapons of non-named characters. If Snake Eyes decides to shoot them with his desert eagle, or throw a shuriken at them the armor is useless. Actually I'm not sure why the rest of the team was required at all as Snake Eyes pretty much handles everything himself. That said there are good FX, good action sequences (especially from the flashback kid actors), to make it pretty decent entertainment. I give it three bullets out of five.

In "Retaliation", everything takes a downward spiral. Both the Joes and Cobra lost almost all their high tech gear for more standard issue stuff (though there are very nice vehicles added in). The previous Joe team is mostly replaced by new and mostly less interesting characters too (other than Dwayne Johnson's Roadblock), and while Snake Eyes is still around his introduction arc is very off-beat and he is no longer as useful plot wise as he suffers from a repeated theme in this movie where "Ninjas are Stupid". I suppose Cobra's engineers must also be ninja descendants because their major plan has a pretty big design flaw, outside the plot holes that you will be poking at. Not sure what happened to this movie but I give it only one and a half bullets out of five.