The Last Pictureshow

The folks who made the new GI Joe movie have not made their masterwork available for critic's screenings. Movie buffs love to chuckle over such naked displays of authorial guilt - hey, they must know it sucks, too, right? - but, frankly what's the point of having the W$J's movie critic spend 2 hours watching a movie inspired by a toy line? The review practically writes itself, and the W$J's readers are not likely to have watched the movie anyway. Still, the W$J's Joe Morganstern cares enough to try to write a review based on nothing more than the trailer: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra

The first thing that happens in the trailer involves the Eiffel Tower, which is hit by a missile and makes a splash by falling into the Seine. I don’t like movies that trash the Eiffel Tower, although I loved “The Lavender Hill Mob,” in which Alec Guinness’s mild-mannered bank clerk smuggles gold bars out of England by turning them into Eiffel Tower paperweights.

The second thing involves an ­actor intoning, voice-over: “We have never faced a threat like this. A team is being assembled. They’re the best operatives in the world. When all else fails, we don’t.” Even apart from the actor pronouncing “assembled” as “assimbled,” the speech suggests a sound clip from an early rehearsal of a junior-high-school pageant. I don’t like movies with bad actors reading dumb lines.

Like, I said, the review practically writes itself. A better focus may have been to ask why the producers of "GI Joe," the original "real American hero," felt compelled to assemble "the best operatives in the world," rather than an all-American crew of stock archetypes and ethnic stereotypes like Hollywood used to do for B-17 bomber crews.

Morganstern likes to declare that movies based on toys are a sign of cultural decline, but surely the de-patriating of an American icon - even if in toy form - is a much more potent symbol of such decline.