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You can actually see the exact moment Stephen Sommers stopped caring about his craft and his audience. It happens during the last 30 minutes of the Mummy Returns. I enjoyed The Mummy and its sequel, but then, all of a sudden, a computer rendered Dwayne Johnson imposed onto the body of a CGI scorpion comes running out of a tunnel, and I wanted to throw up. This is followed by a disastrous blue screen effect of a forest being sucked into a temple. Sommers continued to spit on quality control and production values with his next film, Van Helsing. Then he topped himself with the grand-daddy of them all, G.I. Joe. Somebody get the man a Commodore 64 as he might as well just start throwing stick figures up onto the screen. They would probably look more realistic. The director is so insane that he even made Destro's head a CGI monstrosity. An effect that probably cost a million dollars looks hideous when all he had to do was have a cool looking steel mask made for a tenth of the price.

Watching G.I. Joe a month after Transformers 2 was even more painful. Michael Bay uses his connections and gets numerous jets and aircraft carriers for his film, as well as actually being allowed to film at the pyramids in Egypt. Sommers decided to base The Pitt, the Joe's base of operations, near the same pyramids, but they are lame CGI images. Why is the Pitt not in Washington anyways? Oh, it's because Sommers is a Bay wannabe and tried to copy him unsuccessfully. The majority of the jets in the film are CGI, and even the lone aircraft carrier near the end is CGI. I actually burst out laughing in the theater when I saw that phony looking joke float by on screen.

I could go on all day about the underwater battle where Mr. Eko sits in a chair in front of a blue screen while the audience is supposed to believe he is deep beneath the ocean waging war on numerous other actors sitting in front of a blue screen while wiggling back-and-forth. The single worst scene of the entire movie is when the Baroness runs up a ramp and jumps to Storm Shadow so he can fly her out of the Joe's base. This is literally composed of a bouncing black dot that hops a few times and then jumps up into the air to grab a white dot. Like I said earlier, it's beyond embarrassing that this fake garbage was allowed to be released and people were expected to spend their money on it.

Transformers and G.I. Joe both made changes to the source material. Whether you agree or disagree on the design alterations made in Transformers, at least you can understand the reason for why they were done. Michael Bay wanted to lose the blocky shapes from the cartoon, and he decided that a Camaro looks many times cooler than a Volkswagen. On the other hand, what is the explanation for the changes made in G.I. Joe? Snake Eyes wears a mask and doesn't talk because he had his face nearly blown off in an explosion. In the film, he took a vow of silence because his master was murdered, and he wears a mask just for kicks. What the hell is that??? Instead of meeting Storm Shadow in Vietnam and then joining his ninja clan later after his family is killed in a car accident, the film's origin explains Snake Eyes as a ten-year-old homeless child who sneaks into a ninja clan in search of food, and then he proceeds to go one-on-one with Storm Shadow and hold his own. Did the rats in an alley teach him ninja skills? The Baroness is not an evil woman; she is Duke's girlfriend and was hypnotized. Cobra Commander is the Baroness' brother, and he has to wear a gas mask because he got his face blown off instead of Snake Eyes. He is supposed to be a regular guy who uses connections and money to build a cult and then a terrorist organization. Brendan Fraser makes a cameo as Sgt. Slaughter because apparently, the real Sgt. Slaughter was not available to play himself.

In the theater, G.I. Joe made me laugh in horror and cringe in disgust at its shoddy production values and horrendous CGI quality control. I feel sorry for anyone who spends their hard earned cash to watch it on Blu-Ray where the kindergarten level effects will be even more obvious in high definition.

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