‘G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra’: Whaddya Know Joe? Not Terrible And Fairly Enjoyable Trash

“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”(they might as well have just called it “G.I. Joe: Untitled Sequel Forthcoming”) has gained an air of toxic mystique over the past few days.

After all, this is a movie whose budget approached $200 million without advertising; whose production troubles have been widely broadcast (and some wholly debunked); whose playability in the blue states was deemed a very expensive question mark; and was seemingly so iffy that the studio refused to screen it for any critics of note (at least to meet first-day publication dates). Harry Knowles saw it, though, and loved it. So there’s that.

Here’s the rub – it’s not a terrible movie, at all. It easily, for boyish entertainment jollies, beats the pants off of Michael Bay’s aggressively frantic “Transformers 2.” But the fact that the studio has kept it from critics for so long isn’t going to help (though we’ve embedded some clips from the film interspersed in this review, so you won’t have the same acclimation problems)

Having almost no knowledge of the “G.I. Joe” franchise prior to entering the screening, we didn’t know what we were in for. Since there must be varying levels of understanding of the concept, we’ll just present them as they are displayed in the movie: G.I. Joe is an elite, “World Police”-style group of multinational crime fighters. And they all have silly nicknames. They fight a bunch of badguys, with equally silly names, mostly while equipped with some ridiculous next-level technology. (In the film’s defense, a title card at the beginning lets us know it’s set in the “not too distant future.”)

About the time the G.I. Joe team shows up, led by a sleepy-looking Dennis Quaid as General Hawk, which isn’t all that far into the movie, you get a glimpse of what they’re going for: it’s basically a James Bond movie to the nth degree. The amount of gadgets in this thing is absurd. There are all manner of zooming vehicles — ones that zip through the air, cut through water, and, in the film’s centerpiece action sequence, lets our main characters (Channing Tatum and an adequate Marlon Wayans) bounce around Paris wearing suits that look like Hedi Slimane designing for Iron Man.

That sequence with the suits, which was briefly excerpted online yesterday, is actually one of the movie’s highlights, oddly enough. At that point, the movie taps into a kind of gonzo energy that borders on the volcanic, sending our very human heroes pingponging around populated city streets like escaped videogame characters. It’s inspired lunacy.

Back to the story — it’s basically about Tatum, who doesn’t lack personality as much as he consumes it from those around him (seriously – this dude is a black hole of charisma), and Wayans, as they’re recruited by the elite squad to stop a villain (Christopher Eccelston, chewing scenery) who wants to unleash a weapon that uses tiny robots to LITERALLY chew scenery – they make mincemeat out of the Eiffel tower.

Beyond that, the incoherent plot makes it difficult to tell what’s going on. There’s a villainess named The Baroness (Sienna Miller) who used to be involved with Tatum’s Duke; a badguy who has an endless supply of transformative potions; and copious flashbacks to the ancient feud between karate masters Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park), which are sort of transcendently campy and come out of absolutely nowhere.

The end of the movie is this huge underwater battle sequence, a kind of submerged version of the climax of “Star Wars,” with our heroes piloting little submersibles while trying to take out a larger weapon. By this point you’ve just got to give up trying to resist the movie and its frequently goofy charms and just go along for the ride. All of the shot choices seem more designed for one of those motion simulator rides like “Star Tours” than anything else, and you’ll half expect your theater chair to start vaulting back and forth.

This being a Stephen Sommers film, who oversaw the first two “Mummy” films, the disastrous “Van Helsing” and the underrated “Deep Rising,” it has his signature proclivities towards over-the-top visual effects and oddball humor. And in truth, “G.I. Joe” plays like a kind of greatest hits compilation of his previous work — there are pyramids; a Brendan Fraser cameo; scarred men transforming into other things; Arnold Vosloo; and underwater theatrics. There’s even a prologue set in ancient Europe, which is enough to make those of us who remember “Van Helsing” squirm in our seats a little.

Overall, though, “G.I. Joe” is a fairly enjoyable piece of trash. It’s a kind of big-budget popcorn mishmash of every big budget popcorn movie that came before it, packaged in designer duds with an attractive cast of international actors (among them, Said Taghmaoui from “La Haine” and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, doing some studio hackwork after his earnest performance in the otherwise odious indie “500 Days of Summer”). Somewhere, someone got cold feet, though, and as a result, the movie has, to paraphrase the immortal Michael Jackson, been kept in the closet.

Well, let it out, because it actually can be a lot of brain-dead fun. It’s neither the disaster the studio is making it out to be nor the genius film the geeks and bloggers want to deem it. It’s somewhere in between. And even the most jaded and cynical film goer may find a few reasons to crack a smile at “G.I. Joe.” (and, yes, this could be the late summer grading curve talking, for sure). As a ludicrously over-the-top big-screen experience, you could do a lot worse. [B-] – Drew Taylor