Paramount attempted to revamp the G.I. Joe franchise with Snake Eyes, but the film became a box-office bomb which received mostly negative reviews, and it’s something Andrew Koji saw coming from the beginning.
Andrew Koji played Storm Shadow in Snake Eyes, and while speaking with Inverse (before the SAG-AFTRA strike began), the actor said that he knew 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 wrote in his review. “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 proved to be a failure, it seems that Andrew Koji was correct, but Paramount’s latest attempt at bringing the franchise to the big screen may prove more successful. Andrew Koji was recently seen in Warrior as Ah Sahm, a martial arts prodigy who emigrates from China to San Francisco under mysterious circumstances and becomes a hatchet man for one of Chinatown’s most powerful crime families. The third season of the action series debuted on Max two months ago.