G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Dir: Stephen Sommers)

Fans of the G.I. Joe cartoons, actions figures and playsets will find nostalgic charm in "G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra." The film is faithful to its source material right down to having the good guys shoot red lasers and the bad guys shoot blue lasers. This color coded anarchy is helpful during the manic onscreen melees. It's no help when the two sword carrying ninjas face off. Why does the high tech, high body count, gun-toting Joe force need a ninja? Because the bad guys have a ninja, too. See Cold war, arms race.

The faithfulness to source material also means the movie is incredibly stupid. This is Saturday morning plotting on a giant budget. The bad guys are insanely evil. The good guys are all basically the same character--this one's the black good guy, this one's the French good guy, this one's a girl. Appropriately, for a film based on plastic figures, Channing Tatum plays the lead. The whole enterprise might have been winningly stupid had Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy", "Van Helsing") cast someone else in the lead. Frequent Sommers' leading Brendan Fraser has a cameo in the film and one could imagine him successfully selling this frenetic mess as he has done before. He usually treats this kind of junk as comedy and brings us along for the ride. Tatum acts like he is starring in "Saving Private Ryan."

The film does feature a strong action scene at its center where the good guys try to stop the bad guys from destroying the Eiffel Tower. The music ramps up, the action is more clearly defined than at any other point in the film, and the movie sucks us in for about twenty minutes. After the fight, the movie immediately devolves into heavy handed French bashing that will be bliss for anyone who enjoyed diplomacy is for wusses message of "Transformers 2."

Here is yet another action movie trading in on and coasting on the nostalgia for plastic figures from our youth. It's a loud mess hopefully more indicative of the stupidity of summer than a dumbing down of the movies.