Enter Snake-Eyes

One of my favorite literary quotes comes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash:

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Whenever I think of that quote, whenever I think of devoting my life to “being bad” (even though I’m thirty-two), one name immediately comes to mind as the example par excellence: Snake-Eyes. Because let’s face it, when it comes to ranking the great badasses in the “Great Hall of Badass-ness” that floats somewhere in the heavens, G.I. Joe’s resident silent ninja is pretty much near the top.

And while I’m rather disappointed with some of the changes being made to the franchise for the upcoming G.I. Joe movie (such as casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whom I actually like quite a bit, as Cobra Commander), I will sing its praises provided they do just one thing: they don’t f*ck around with Snake-Eyes.

Please, just make him badder than bad, make him the meanest mo-fo to ever wield a katana and a gun at the same time, make him live up to his G.I. Joe filecards (1982, 1985, 1989, 1991, 1997). And if the photo above is any indication, they’re heading in the right direction. *

You can see a larger version of the photo, as well as another one, over at AICN.

Just one question, though: where’s Timber? A ninja sporting a katana and a gun is bad-ass, but a ninja sporting a katana and a gun and accompanied by a wolf? Now that’s just epic.

* - Then again, I thought that last year’s Transformers movie would be all kinds of awesome because they had the classic “transformation sound” in the trailer. Boy, was I wrong.

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• Mar 23, 2008, 9:43pm