Paramount tried to revamp the G.I. Joe franchise with Snake Eyes, however the movie ended up being a box-office bomb which received mainly negative evaluations, and it’s something Andrew Koji saw originating from the start.
Andrew Koji played Storm Shadow in Snake Eyes, and while talking to Inverse (prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike started), the star said that he understood the G.I. Joe reboot wasn’t going to be a success. “Hollywood is just obsessed with telling the same old thing over and again,” Koji said. “Firstly, remakes. Secondly, it’s got to be based on IP. Third, it’s so absurd because I’m just like, hold on. People want originality. Where is it? What is going on here? Snake Eyes didn’t do too well, which I knew it wasn’t going to. I think they’re probably going to reboot from the ground up. I’m cool. I did like Storm Shadow Tommy. I found a way to love him and I think there would’ve been something to do … there would’ve been a really cool Storm Shadow film if they did it right.“
Building a film around Snake Eyes, who is arguably the most popular G.I. Joe character, seemed like a sure thing, but the movie just didn’t connect with fans, who took aim at the sub-par action scenes. “The first major action sequence involves Snake Eyes in a no-holds-barred cage match,” our own JimmyO composed in his evaluation. “The scene is muddy and messy, and the shaky camera work is a bit frustrating to watch. Perhaps it was simply that the director wanted you to feel what it was like to be in the ring. Nope. It’s all like that. The action sequences are all a series of close-ups, with the camera constantly moving and shaking as you try and get a glimpse of what is going on.”
As Snake Eyes showed to be a failure, it appears that Andrew Koji was right, however Paramount’s latest effort at bringing the franchise to the cinema might show more effective. Andrew Koji was just recently seen in Warrior as Ah Sahm, martial arts prodigy who emigrates from China to San Francisco under mystical situations and ends up being a hatchet man for among Chinatown’s most effective criminal activity households. The 3rd season of the action series debuted on Max 2 months earlier.
