Now that movies based on video games are no longer shorthand for D-grade shlock that’s more likely than not to bomb at the box office, with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie instantly becoming a top 2026 grosser and Mortal Kombat II expected to do well at the summer box office, maybe games have finally surpassed their analog counterparts — which leaves movies based on action figures on the lower rung of Hollywood’s never-ending IP-fixation ladder.

Now, technically, video game movies have a ways to go before they generate as much cash as the eight-movies-and-counting Transformers series, several installments of which have made a billion dollars globally. But despite some good reviews for the animated spinoff Transformers One, it couldn’t match its predecessors at the box office (it was fairly thrashed by a more peaceful metallic option, The Wild Robot), and it seems unlikely that a Transformers movie will hit that galactic Super Mario level any time soon. Outside of Hasbro’s crown jewel, things look even bleaker. Its best movie has been a Dungeons & Dragons adaptation — of a tabletop game they acquired, rather than one of their signature properties. The company attempted to revive its moderately successful but mostly dormant live-action G.I. Joe series in 2021, and rolled Snake Eyes. No, not the eerily prescient Brian De Palma/Nicolas Cage thriller from 1998, but a flop action movie attempting to elucidate the origin of the silent masked-ninja commando played by the original Darth Maul, Ray Park, in G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (also a patented Dwayne Johnson rescue mission), movies whose collective global grosses of almost $700 million serve as vital proof that they definitely exist.

On that level, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins exists even less. It made a grim $40 million worldwide. To put that into perspective, the Cage Snake Eyes made more in the U.S. alone… 23 years earlier. Maybe the later Snake Eyes could have eked out a little more before the global pandemic, but appearing in its aftermath made it especially clear that this was exactly the kind of unbidden brand extension that audiences would not be returning to theaters en masse to see.

Streaming, however, is another thing entirely. Though Snake Eyes has kicked around Paramount+ for a while as a Paramount title, its availability on Netflix seems to have spiked heretofore unseen levels of interest (meaning that it’s been in the Netflix Top 10 for over a week now). And honestly? It kind of deserves the attention.

It was completely understandable that a prequel spinoff of a dead-end 2010s movie series based on action figures from the 1980s didn’t make bank at the box office, and one has to be careful not to oversell a movie that is, after all, very much what is promised by the title Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins. At the same time, the movie doesn’t have that much to do with the earlier G.I. Joe movies, in style or content, and pretty much works as a silly big-budget ninja action movie. Henry Golding plays Snake Eyes, whose lifelong pursuit of his father’s killer leads him to employment with the Yakuza, which in turn leads to him attempting to infiltrate a ninja clan. Mostly this is an excuse to zip from crime-movie fights to ninja training sequences to jewel-thieving to bigger battles.

Director Robert Schwentke, who has made a number of unremarkable action movies, does a few simple, maybe even cheap things in putting all this together. First, he lights the hell out of it. The movie is saturated with green neon highlights, faces that glow orange-yellow, mystical gems that glow red in lantern-lit hallways, rich black shadows, and cool backlighting; it’s slickly stylish in a way that used to be pretty standard for this scale of action wannabe blockbuster, but has long since been muted into grayish muck by some of the most supposedly colorful film franchises around. Schwentke also uses a ton of handheld camera, another technique that was once trendy bordering on vexing, but here gives the early scenes especially a sense of urgency and motion that papers over action choreo that’s cool, but not quite John Wick level. It’s not even quite at the Ballerina level of hot people kicking ass, the welcome presence of Samara Weaving in a supporting role notwithstanding (in a bit of casting that someone, somewhere, almost certainly thought of as a possible seed for another spinoff).

So basically, yes, cheap tricks abound: color and whooshing and Samara Weaving. But the movie is refreshingly non-jokey about its own silliness; it lets the silliness breathe. Also, Snake Eyes does, at one point, fight a trio of gigantic snakes. That’s the kind of CG overkill I can get behind. It’s better than other action-figure movies (unless you count Toy Story) and better than a lot of video game movies, too. It captures the aesthetic pleasure of both: the stylized glow of games, the posable impossibility of figures doing their little imaginary ninja tricks. Maybe this movie’s destiny was to be watched from the floors of living rooms everywhere.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins on Netflix