G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - 4K Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra



Movie:
4K Video:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:

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Movie
Go Joe!!

Ah yes, 2009’s big flop. As a rabid fan of the old G.I. Joe show growing up (another one of Mattel’s TV shows meant to sell toys, ala Transformers and Masters of the Universe) I very guiltily admit that I like the 2009 live action film. It’s in NO WAY a close replication of the characters from the show, but it’s an ooey gooey mess of syrupy comic book tropes, bad dialogue, and things going boom. Not to mention we get Ray Parks as Snake Eyes (albeit with that horrible set of plastic lips molded into his mask, which is reminiscent of bat nipples on George Clooney’s Batman suit from Batman and Robin). With Snake Eyes hitting theaters this month, paramount decided to pull out the stops and release both of the live action movies onto 4K UHD (like they tend to do when a sequel hits theaters). The end result is a bit mediocre due to the dropped extras and very middling video encode, but it’s a livable release for those who haven’t picked up the Blu-ray yet.

Except for the names and the fact that things go boom, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is nothing like the old Saturday morning cartoon that every young red blooded American boy (and some girls, not gonna discriminate) watched every morning. It’s an excuse to cram in big name actors into a super cheesy cartoony like adaptation that’s filled with super powered exo suits, Marlon Wayans fast talking comedy , and Channing Tatum flashing his boyish smile at the camera to make the girls swoon. Basically your typical Stephen Sommers summer blockbuster (being that he did make The Mummy series) film, just with the G.I. Joe name.

Sometime in the close future arms dealer extraordinaire James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) has created a weapon of mass destruction using nanotechnology that the world has ever seen. When NATO purchases his weapons and is in the process of transporting it across the nation, the shipment is almost hijacked by the mysterious Baroness (Sienna Miller) and her high tech team of goons. The Army soldiers transporting the weapons are easily overwhelmed, but are pulled out of the fire when a mysterious covert ops team comes in to save the day, and end up saving Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlan Wayans) from certain destruction. Turns out that this team is a super secret group of black ops soldiers known as “G.I. Joes”. Wanting to avenge the death of his teammates, Duke and Ripcord ask to be apart of the mission taking down the Baroness and her employers (which TOTALLY makes sense. Your Commanding Officer is totally going to be cool with you jumping ship to some unknown military group and say “yeah sure, go hang out with them a bit, we don’t need you back in your contracted military group that you signed up for. Have fun boys!”).

Training with the Joes to get up to speed with their hard and fast style, Duke, Ripcord and the rest of the Joes suddenly realize that they’ve been double crossed as it’s revealed that James McCullen is behind the entire thing, and is trying to create an army of super soldiers named “Vipers” in an effort to take over the rest of the world. So, you guessed it. Duke, Ripcord, Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), Break (Said Taghmaoui) and Snake Eyes (Ray Parks) have to go on a world wide hunt for McCullen and take him down before his dastardly plan slaughters millions.

The movie is about 20 minutes too long, too silly, and just way over the top Stephen Sommers style action. There are some things to like about the movie, such as the winking and nodding at the camera for many of the lines, and the inclusion of Byung-hun Lee as Storm Shadow and Ray Parks as Snake Eyes was great. The two’s rivalry is one of the biggest Joe legends and watching the two of them duke it out on screen was fun. However, Marlon Wayans is pretty painful as Ripcord, and Dennis Quaid is just going through the motions. Jonathan Price hams it up as the president, but is really just fairly useless in the role (he’s MUCH better in the sequel I might add). Rise of Cobra is a slightly fun movie that is a gigantic CGI mess of a film, and while it’s objectively bad, I still kind of like the movie. It’s big, it’s dumb, It’s got lots of explosions and stuff, and it makes a decent “check your brain at the door” action movie.




Rated PG-13 for strong sequences of action violence and mayhem throughout




4K Video: Video:

This is actually the first time that I’ve been let down by a 4K UHD disc from Paramount. Usually they and Sony are the kings of 4K UHD catalog releases, and while not everyone is PERFECT (plenty of 4/5 rated movies) they have always been good at the very least. This is the first time where I actually had to A/B between the Blu-ray and the 4K UHD to make sure I was actually watching a 4K signal. Visually the two are very very similar, but there ARE some minor differences that edge out the Blu-ray. The first being black levels. They’re just deeper and inkier than the Blu-ray can hope to achieve. However, the noise is still there that was always present on the Blu-ray and the HDR increase in color quality just isn’t massive. Bright greens and reds and other colors DO pop just a bit more, and the 4K UHD definitely has some finer details along faces and backgrounds (sometimes a little bit TOO revealing when you consider the 2009 CGI), but overall this is a very minor upgrade over the Blu-ray at all.






Audio:

It’s always a guessing game whether Paramount is going to recycle the Blu-rays audio mix or give it an Atmos upgrade, but it looks like we’re left with the recycled 5.1 DTS-HD MA mix found on the 2009 Blu-ray disc. While I would have loved to have a new Atmos mix, the 5.1 track was a demo track back in the day, and still a stunner 12 years later. Powerful, aggressive (although recorded a bit low as I ended up boosting the volume level 6 DB’s over the 7.1 Dolby TrueHD track found on the sequel, but nothing simply turning the knob on the receiver won’t fix) and full of life, the 5.1 track still hums with energy. The copious amount of planes shrieking about overhead, the tense action score, and the tons of battle scenes keep this one from slowing down one bit. Bass is tight and powerful (although it is not as “in your face” as the sequel, but a flatter bass response instead) with lots of room to throw it’s weight around, and the dialog is crystal clear. Great mix 12 years ago, still a great mix today.





Extras:

• Audio Commentary by director Stephen Sommers and producer Bob Ducsay

Final Score: ​

As I said in the video score section, I was a bit surprised how mediocre the video release was for this title. Usually Paramount is on the ball, and it’s not like we have some troubled master with tons of DNR and messy digital manipulations like Forest Gump had happen. It’s just a very middling upgrade over the Blu-ray and combined with the fact that the audio is recycled, and the only extra is the commentary (all the special features on the Blu-ray release were on a second DVD in the set, which is not included here) makes me say that this is not something I’d spend money upgrading. Decent watch, release is a bit underwhelming technically speaking


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayons, Dennis Quaid, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brendan Frasier
Directed by: Stephone Sommers
Written by: Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, Paul Lovett
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: DTS-HD MA 5.1, German, Spanish, French, Spanish (Latin), Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian DD 5.1
Subtitles: English, English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional), Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Thai
Studio: Paramount
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 118 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: July 20th 2021

Recommendation: Decent Watch