Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins movie review (2021)

Snake Eyes must avenge his father (Steven Allerick), who was executed by an assassin (Samuel Finzi) on behalf of Cobra, a cabal of flamboyantly dressed terrorists. Snake Eyes would do anything to catch his father’s killer, even betray his buddy Tommy “Storm Shadow” Arashikage (Andrew Koji), the main heir to the clandestine Arashikage ninja clan. But to gain Tommy’s trust, Snake Eyes must impress Tommy’s family by passing a series of ninja trials involving giant snakes and a magic rock. Somehow, despite all this giddy silliness, “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins” is somehow not a romp, but rather a snooze.

How could this happen? Mostly because the filmmakers are committed to, but never invested in the values and identity of a comic book antihero whose main appeal is his strong, silent type schtick. A little usually goes a long way with Snake Eyes, because, as with the other G.I. Joe characters, there isn’t much to the character beyond some buzzy, kid-friendly umbrella concepts, like loyalty and honesty.

So Snake Eyes’ big test of character is will he sell Tommy out—to Kenta (Takehiro Kira), a disgraced member of the Arashikage clan—in exchange for information about his father’s killer? The answer will absolutely not surprise you, but that’s almost beside the point. The real problem with “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins” is that it answers a question nobody wondered about, and with dismally overproduced dialogue and action filmmaking. It’s too polished to be a war crime, but it’s also too bland to be a decent summer movie.

A lot of dialogue in “Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins” puffs up a convoluted story about stick figure characters who wander around formerly exotic locations—the neon-lit alleys of Shinjuku, a ninja fort’s willowy cherry blossom-filled courtyard—and talk at length about betraying and/or testing each other. Everybody has a belabored and/or sassy answer to each other’s questions, like who’s Cobra, what’s a G.I. Joe, why do you want to befriend Tommy so badly, and do you think we can trust this Snake Eyes guy? There’s also not much chemistry between the movie’s leads, partly because they don’t seem to share screentime for more than a second or two at a time.