Salt Lake Tribune Review

It's always great to indulge in an action movie that's just dumb fun. But the makers of "G.I Joe" only fulfill half of the deal -- they get the dumb, but not the fun.

Inspired by the line of action figures -- and the toy marketing is evident before the opening credits, when Hasbro gets its own vanity logo right after the Paramount Pictures mountain -- the movie is chock-full of characters wearing body-hugging Kevlar and employing all sorts of high-tech gadgetry.

It's like watching the toy shelf at Target come to life, with all the missile shooters and sound chips going off at once.

There's some semblance of a story here: After their missile convoy is attacked, U.S. soldiers Conrad "Duke" Hauser (Channing Tatum) and Wallace "Ripcord" Weems (Marlon Wayans) are rescued by an elite fighting unit, called G.I. Joe, and are temporarily invited onboard by the team's leader, Gen. Hawk (Dennis Quaid).

The Joes are hunting for the baddies who want the missiles -- with metal-eating "nanomites" that could wipe out a city -- and start suspecting that the arms tycoon who developed them, McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), is playing both sides. Front and center for the bad guys, an underwhelming group collectively called Cobra, is The Baroness (Sienna Miller), who turns out to be Duke's former fiance Ana.

Being an origin story, the committee-written script has about three times as much backstory as story. In some ludicrously introduced flashbacks,we learn of Duke's romance of Ana and how Duke held himself responsible when Ana's science-officer brother, Rex (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), was lost in battle. Even more awkwardly inserted are the histories of G.I. Joe's silent martial-arts fighter, Snake Eyes (performed by Ray Park, who played Darth Maul in "Star Wars, Episode I"), and his childhood rival-turned-enemy, Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee).

Director Stephen Sommers ("The Mummy") tries to throw everything into the pot and hope there's soup at the end. There are massive CGI set pieces, from the destruction of the Eiffel Tower to a Cobra lair that most James Bond villains would find ostentatious.

Some acting is as stiff as the toys that inspired the characters (Tatum and Miller especially), while other performers go completely over-the-top (notably Eccleston, the former "Doctor Who," whose slimy arms merchant uses as a shield his impenetrable Scottish accent). Sommers also throws in cameos from "The Mummy" (hello, Brendan Fraser) and catchphrases pulled from the '80s "G.I. Joe" cartoon -- such as "Yo, Joe!" and "a real American hero" -- that fall with a thud when delivered.

Paramount Pictures opted to hide "G.I. Joe" from movie critics before opening, with a spin-control campaign saying the studio wanted "to let the audience define the movie." That's a cynical approach that assumes audiences aren't bright enough to sniff out the producers' desperation in trying to salvage this noisy mess. Audiences know the signs of a lame August release -- and, as the Joes say, knowing is half the battle.

-- Sean P. Means

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