One of the highlights of the film is a sequence where our heroes pursue terrorists who are threatening to destroy Paris with a W.M.D. Guns blazing, they take out the terrorists but not without many casualties. While Paris and millions are saved, the Eiffel Tower is destroyed and it is a Pyrrhic victory.

But enough about Team America: World Police.  We’re here to talk about G.I. Joe, which is very similar except that the acting isn’t as good.

First, I will start with the best surprise about G.I. Joe: it wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be when they first announced that G.I. Joe would be an international force headquartered in Belgium. Unless I missed it, and in this cacophonous film that is certainly possible, Belgium is never mentioned, nor the new acronym for the organization.   This film’s production has been as tumultuous as the many aborted attempts at bringing Superman back to the big screen.  Hard to believe that the film now subtitled “The Rise of Cobra” once had a script where Cobra didn’t appear at all since the creators thought it was a dumb organization.

To its credit…and also its detriment… G.I. Joe is for the most part a live action version of what we got in the cartoon show.  Swarms of one-person vehicles firing blasts at other vehicles.   A villain with a campy voice whose motivations don’t make a lick of sense.  And two organizations seemingly drowning in money for headquarters, equipment, ships, planes and weapons.

Summaries of the plot can be found everywhere, so I’m not going to bother beyond what’s necessary.  Christopher Eccleston plays Destr- er, McCullen, a weapons manufacturer who has invented nanites that can tear down anything.  He built the technology with NATO funds, which is why he has to steal them back from NATO forces.  Of course, he also has a subterranean complex the size of Wichita, so he doesn’t appear to be hurting for money.  His is the most complex character in the film, since he wants to take over the world (boo!)  and take revenge on the French (that’s fine).

Dennis Quaid commands the screen in a thankless role.  As macho as he comes across, his part is still the equivalent of Basil Exposition’s in the Austin Powers films and he probably filmed them in a couple of hours.

Sienna Miller turns out to be a very good actress, much more than just a pretty butt that is highlighted in all the posters, and there are other excellent actors in this film, but with this script there is not much for them to do to give their characters more depth.

The action in this movie is non-stop, probably so that the audience doesn’t have time to reflect on the wisdom of the plot.  The editing makes Michael Bay’s Transformers look like a Benji movie.

Unlike the cartoon with the ubiquitous parachutes, here people die in large numbers.  To avoid an R rating, no result of any gunshot is ever shown.  People scream and then the camera immediately cuts to something else.  The video game-style loss of life reaches the height of ridiculousness in a sequence that puts the Matrix to shame. Two Joes in accelerator suits are running through the city streets of Paris chasing after a Cobra Hummer that begins chucking mini-vans full of people at them.  Duke and Ripcord dodge the vehicles and keep on running with nary a thought towards the families that are getting squished.  They might as well be hopping over barrels hocked at them by a giant ape.  Focusing on the civilians for even a few seconds might help to put the stakes into perspective, but would probably get in the way of the adrenaline rush.

The frantic, rapid, constant camera cuts may be fine for this current ADHD generation of teens… and I add that qualification only because my niece says the action in Transformers wasn’t hard to follow at all, so she may have some kind of Wally West perception thing going on… but I found the movie to be a headache waiting to happen.

When the movie ended, the credits rolled and the soundtrack cranked up to some really horrible boom boom rap song, I thought it was the appropriate ending to a mediocre film that made my eyeballs bleed.  Actually, the perfect ending would still have been an instrumental version of the “A Real American Hero, G.I. Joe is There” theme song, but I knew the film-makers had avoided it.  For a second, I thought about toughing it out through the whole credits just to see if there might be a silly PSA where Ripcord saves a kid from a construction site or something, but I gave up.

Look, you all know my politics.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe, despite the ample evidence that American films with a “rah-rah go America” attitude do just fine in overseas sales, maybe this film would have been dismally wounded in sales as every critic east of the Seinne would have been making comparisons between G.I. Joe and America’s military arrogance, etc.  All I know is that the oh-so-obvious attempts to distance this property from America gave this thing a stinking odor that it did not need to have…and the many ways it stinks in addition to that did not help.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that “The Mummy”, a pretty good action film that is rock-solid entertaining, is still Stephen Sommers’ best film.   Is there no greatness in him?  Can’t he try to do something with just a little more maturity than that of a 9-year-old playing Hungry Hungry Hippos?