GI Joe 2

Tom Cruise's futuristic new release, Oblivion, won this weekend's box office, beating expectations and earning $38.2 million. Bumped to second place was 42 with $18 million, while The Croods stayed steady in third place, adding $9.5 million to its total. Scary Movie 5 made $6.3 million, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation rounded out the top five with a $5.8 million haul.

Horror reboot Evil Dead won the box office this weekend, raking in $26 million and besting G.I. Joe: Retaliation and The Croods, both of which added $21.1 million to their total. "New" release Jurassic Park 3D came in at fourth place and took in $18.3 million, a sizable amount for a rerelease. Olympus Has Fallen rounded out the top five with $10 million, while limited-release films The Company You Keep and Trance, directed by Danny Boyle, earned $146,000 in five theaters and $136,000 in four theaters respectively.

Action sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation took over the box office in its opening weekend, raking in $41.2 million. Last week's no. 1, The Croods, came in second with $26.5 million, followed by new release Tyler Perry's Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor with $22.3 million. Olympus Has Fallen fell to fourth with $14 million, and Oz the Great and Powerful added $11.6 million to its grand total. Another new release The Host failed to crack the top five and took in a disappointing $11 million.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is out in theaters this week after a bit of a delay, presumably to improve the movie, but after seeing it, I wonder how bad it was before. Filled with tanks, explosions, buff bodies, and 3D (the newest must-have accessory for action flicks), the sequel to 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has all the elements of a great action movie. Unfortunately, it's a barrage of unintentionally hilarious dialogue from stars Dwayne Johnson and Adrianne Palicki, unbelievable gadgetry, and plot holes. Thankfully, there is some standout action, and yes, Channing Tatum appears, but it's not enough to constitute a trip to the theater. Here are my reasons for why you can skip this sequel.

1. There's not enough Tatum. Don't be fooled by the trailer or the pictures, Duke (Tatum) is only on screen for about 20 minutes. Maybe it's because we know the film was held for a year in order to add more Tatum, but his scenes feel obviously shoehorned in. I felt robbed.
2. There's not enough Bruce Willis, either. When the soldiers are cornered, they turn to one of their own: the retired General Joe Colton (Willis). Willis is allowed to strut around and enjoy the fact that, after years in the suburbs, Colton's skills — and his arsenal of weapons hidden in kitchen cabinets — are needed. I just wish he had more (and longer) scenes.
3. The plotholes are too wide to overlook. This time around, the team is ambushed by an enemy posing as the president, and only three soldiers remain. Abandoned in the desert halfway around the world, Roadblock (Johnson), Lady Jaye (Palicki), and Flint (D.J. Cotrona) find their way back to the states. Presumed dead by the government, they lie low in Roadblock's old neighborhood and somehow acquire an entire stock of state-of-the-art technology, the kind that allows you to put a hair in a lipstick tube and have its DNA code analyzed and matched within seconds. You know, just the gadgets you have lying around.

See more of my reasons after the jump.

Fierce box office competition, 3D reshoots, and rewrites to expand Channing Tatum's part caused G.I. Joe: Retaliation's June 2012 release date to be pushed back, but it looks like that time may have been used wisely. The original trailer came out around this time last year, but the new preview feels way more badass than the first one. The G.I. Joe task force — headed by Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock — has been declared traitorous and left for dead. The president himself signed off on the order to abandon the team, except he's not really the president; he's some kind of crazed nuclear war genius hiding in the president's skin (science!). It's up to the G.I. Joes to save the world, even though they've been betrayed by their own country.

Give me Bruce Willis in a high-octane action flick and I'm there. I hope that his role is significant because even though Tatum (who starred in 2009's original G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) is supposedly playing a bigger part, it still doesn't look like he's got much screen time. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is set for release on March 29 (for real this time), but you can watch the trailer after the jump.

I hope you weren't expecting to see too much of Channing Tatum in G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation, because his character Duke only makes the briefest of appearances despite his starring role in the original. After his character is apparently disposed of, we meet the new folks tasked with carrying the action film in his place: Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock, Adrianne Palicki as Lady Jaye, and (drumroll, please) Bruce Willis as G.I. Joe himself.

The new squad of Joes has to defeat Zartan to save the world (as elite soldier squads are often called on to do), so the preview offers us lots of footage of them training in various ways, as well as many shots of Palicki's assets, of course. Willis doesn't pop up until the end or so, but he's making the most of it, firing off a very large gun and spouting a quip. I enjoy seeing him in action star mode, but aside from that and a new rendition of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," this trailer isn't pumping me up that much. Watch and see what you think after the jump.

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