There wasn’t a high bar set for Snake Eyes, the origin story of the toy-based military team’s silent ninja member. The previous two films failed to spark a franchise in any meaningful way so why wouldn’t Paramount try an Avengers style approach and build up team-members individually? Henry Golding in the lead role? This might have the potential for a decent action film. Oh how wrong I was. Snake Eyes is an absolute disaster of a film from start to finish, just as bad as the previous entries with awful action, cheesy characters and downright dreadful dialogue. The briefest of bright spots comes in Golding, who tries his best to keep it all afloat, but ultimately fails in jumpstarting this tired, hackneyed franchise into anything other than mindless noise.
Our bland story begins with Snake Eyes (Henry Golding) witnessing his father’s murder as a child. Cut to several years later and our now adult hero is drifting through life, enjoying the occasional bare knuckle cage match before he is approached by Yakuza head honcho Kenta (Takehiro Hira) and offered the chance to join his crew and earn the location of his father’s killer. When he refuses to execute rival clan leader Tommy (Andrew Koji) on Kenta’s orders, Snake Eyes (yes, that really is the only name the character is given) is forced to go on the run, hiding out with Tommy’s family in Tokyo and undertaking a series of three challenges to become a ninja, whilst secretly carrying out his quest for revenge.
See how that sentence went naturally from refusing to execute a man to becoming a ninja? No? Well the film doesn’t either, moving from plot point to plot point without any connective tissue as Snake Eyes carries out a series of formulaic, done-to-death action movie tasks. Why does Snake Eyes need to become a trained ninja to kill his father’s killer, by all accounts a low-level thug? No idea but here’s that shaky-cam filled fight sequence where characters leap 10 feet in the air without explanation that you were clamouring for. Why does Tommy open his home and spill all the secrets of his clan to this outsider? Well because the plot demands it of course. Snake Eyes having to fight giant anacondas to become a ninja? It’s in the name, duh.
Every scene that isn’t filled with terrible action or some hollow attempt at ninja bonding serves only to expand the franchise in some clunky way. Take Samara Weaving’s appearance as franchise favourite character Scarlett. A largely throwaway role, she shows up, shoots a few baddies and then… delivers an exposition dump that sets up the next film in the franchise. Likewise with franchise shadow organisation Cobra, who inexplicably make an appearance and then swiftly exit the picture. These scenes are so ham-fistedly shoehorned into the film and overly engineered to start a franchise, that the filmmakers didn’t think to actually make the characters in this film worth our time and investment. Why worry about that when you can make more money off future team-up films I guess.
Paramount has made this same mistake twice before and still shows no signs of having learnt its lessons. Sure, the mythology of these films essentially boils down to children bashing action figures together but that doesn’t mean that the film adaptation of that needs to be mindless, chaotic action for 2 hours. Audiences need interesting characters and situations that they actually care about to get behind a franchise. Take the DC universe for example. They jumped the gun throwing all their characters straight into Justice League and the resulting film was a total mess. But they righted the ship by ensuring that (almost) every subsequent film has been an emotionally centred, focused narrative about an individual character that the audiences can get behind, like Aquaman.
For his part, Henry Golding does what he can with the limited material given to him. He’s a good actor, capable of charming his way through a movie like Crazy Rich Asians or going in a totally different direction like his gleefully deranged turn in The Gentlemen. In Snake Eyes, that range and ability is never tested; the character is the same blank slate hero we have seen a thousand times before, a boring audience surrogate who is injected into the family feud between Tommy and Kenta without having any actual stakes in the fight. Characters fawn over him and thrust him into crazy new situations without any good reason and his response is never anything other than a slightly disgruntled at the thought of having to fight the entire Yakuza. For those worried Golding would remain tight-lipped as the famously silent assassin, fear not, as one of the characters most defining traits is simply removed so as to make him as milquetoast as possible.
Henry Golding deserves better than Snake Eyes, an absolute mess of a film that completely wastes his talents while succeeding at bludgeoning its audience to death with a cocktail of everything that is wrong with modern action films. If the other films in the franchise didn’t do it then this latest attempt at making the G.I. Joe property “a thing” should surely be the final nail in the coffin for those burly relics of the eighties. At this point, contesting with the snakes would be a better option than watching another entry in this franchise.
Snake Eyes stars Henry Golding, Andrew Koji, Haruka Abe, Takehiro Hira, Iko Uwais, Peter Mensah, Úrsula Corberó, Eri Ishida & Samara Weaving – Available to rent or buy now.