G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009): C

Basically Team America: World Police played straight and minus the political edge, Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has everything an adolescent boy might crave: buff, fearless soldiers, plentiful gunfire and explosions, and opposing objects of horndog desire in the form of buxom redhead do-gooder Scarlett (Rachel Nichols) and svelte brunette vixen Baroness (Sienna Miller). Encased in skin-tight black leather that only breathes through a cleavage-revealing slit, Miller in particular is a hormonal teenager’s wet dream made real. Her baddie provides the requisite erotic charge to go alongside director Sommers’ incessant CG mayhem, which is surprisingly graphic (no obligatory shots of parachuting-to-safety pilots à la the cartoon) and features enough high-tech sci-fi military hardware – voice-controlled jets, rocket-equipped Hummers, super-powering Acceleration Suits – to make Michael Bay salivate with jealousy. G.I. Joe concerns the titular covert international military squad’s battle with a Scottish weapons dealer (Christopher Eccleston) and his scientist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who have personal grudges against hunky new Joe recruit Duke (Channing Tatum). Nonetheless, story particulars, most of which have to do with nanomachines, are of little importance. Rather, the focus is first and foremost on rock-‘em-sock-‘em clichés, so many of which were parodied by Matt Parker and Trey Stone’s aforementioned puppet blockbuster – macho posturing, a wheelchair-bound unit commander, team members’ sexual repartee, the destruction of good guy HQ, the annihilation of the Eiffel Tower – that Sommers seems to have used that film as a virtual template. While G.I. Joe’s mimicry of Team America may confirm that parody’s astuteness, it also proves the durability of said tropes, if only in the hearts and minds of middle-schoolers. Although given how vapid, monotonous, and cheesy Sommers’ computer-enhanced, personality-deprived saga ultimately proves, it’s hard to imagine even my Joe-loving nine-year-old self being anything more than moderately diverted by this feature-length Hasbro toy commercial.