G.I. Joe: Renegades

Our Review

G.I. Joe: Renegades is what happened when The Hub decided its boys franchise deserved a serious reboot. It premiered November 26, 2010 with a two part special and ran 26 half hour episodes to July 2011: the Joe team survives a catastrophic explosion at Cobra Pharmaceuticals, gets framed for it on national television, and goes underground as fugitives, a band of ordinary Joes running sabotage from the desert while the country that swore to protect them hunts them. Cobra Industries meanwhile owns the story the government tells, and the series treats that corruption as the real villain.

The premise is the best G.I. Joe has ever been given on screen. Heroes legally hunted by their own government changes the texture of every scene, and the writers commit: identities hidden, hits run deniable, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow finally get their full history dramatized, Doctor Mindbender and Serpentor return properly warped, and the serialization is real enough that cancellation partway through the story still stings fifteen years on. IMDb users put it at 7.1.

What drags the score is execution budget. The CGI is stiff, several early episodes share one heist skeleton, and a roster this deep gets rationed too thin. But for anyone who wanted the franchise aimed up instead of down, it is the one to watch, and the unfinished arc is exactly why the fan campaigns never died. Renegades streams free on Tubi in the US. Twenty six episodes, one season, one long cliffhanger.