Be sure to leave your brain at home when seeing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as this one’s solely for the eyes and ears. On second thought, leave them behind as well; Stephen Sommers’ (The Mummy, Van Helsing) live-action take on the popular toy franchise is a lively, yet tedious, assault on the senses. I say ‘live-action’ with a pinch of salt, given there’s hardly anything living in sight; 95% of G.I. Joe is made up of second-rate CGI, whilst the remaining 5% comprises of heartless characterisations that are no more real than the dolls they’re based on.

Maybe I need to be 12 years old, or a childhood fan of the toy franchise, to enjoy whatever it is this film has to offer. It must be said that Sommers’ film is proudly stupid, and in the same vein as The Mummy and Van Helsing, never tries to be anything more than 118 minutes of summer fluff. But whereas The Mummy succeeded in being mindless entertainment, G.I. Joe is simply mindless. It’s essentially an over-long videogame cut scene, where one tacky CGI action sequence would end only for another to begin, leaving it up to snippets of horribly rigid dialogue to try and explain what the hell is actually going on.

What story there is concerns corrupt arms dealer  Destro (Christopher Eccleston), to whom I speculate in the absence of any supplied reason, grew tired being mocked for his  Scottish accent and thus developed a grudge against humanity and a desire to take over the world. Fortunately for him, he has developed the perfect weapon for the job; a warhead that contains millions of metal eating nanobots, which has the power to devour an entire city in minutes. Trying not to raise suspicion, Destro sells the missiles to the US military, before getting his sassy agent, The Barnoness (a sleepwalking Sienna Miller), to steal them back. In order to do so, she must take on the G.I. Joe’s, a top secret US military outfit helmed by the hardened General Hawk (Dennis Quaid). New to the elite team are former US marines Duke (Channing Tatum) and his loudmouth buddy Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), who must stop  Destro from unleashing his nanobots and plunging the world into a state of chaos.

For a seemingly undemanding popcorn flick, Stuart Beattie and David Elliot’s screenplay is unnecessarily convoluted, which comes down to an over-abundance of characters all vying for screen time. When these characters aren’t relentlessly trying to kill each other in the present, we’re provided brief flashbacks of their past, where it turns out they were doing much the same as children; relentlessly trying to kill each other. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I struggle to see how a flashback that merely shows the character doing exact same thing, albeit 20 years prior, helps develop these cardboard cut-outs into something more.

I do admit it’s somewhat refreshing to see a film not take itself seriously, which is a common cause for criticism amongst many other big-budget action films.Yet G.I Joe tends to goes too far in the other direction, desperately trying to point out to the audience just how cheesy it is. As such, the action is exaggerated to the point where a sense of danger is no longer gaugeable, certain costumes and characters are borderline sardonic (a Darth Vader-esque mad scientist deserves a special mention), and the sets look like something out of Disneyland’s Space Mountain.

But it was at the film’s half way point, where the Joe’s can be seen trying to ‘save the day’ in Paris only to leave behind a devastating trail of destruction, that I realised G.I. Joe is essentially a live-action remake of 2004’s Team America: World Police. The similarities between the two are uncanny, the most obvious being that both concern a ‘crack’ team of pretentious American soldiers who span the globe in the pursuit of terrorism, carelessly destroying everything that stands in their way. Aside from the fact that both films feature wooden performances – which you can’t really hold against Team America considering they’re all puppets – the characters are strikingly similar as well; much like the protagonist Greg from Team America, Channing Tatum’s Duke is also the new-guy on the team, who excels at everything he does, yet is haunted by the loss of someone he loved. Then there’s Dennis Quaid as General Hawk, whose performance is perhaps even more over-the-top than that of Spottswoode, a near identical character seen in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s hilarious satire. It’s almost as if G.I Joe was the very film Team America was poking fun at, despite it being five years too late.

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