'G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra' (Sommers, 2009)

Between this, Isaac Florentine's Ninja, and the Wachowski-McTeigue film Ninja Assassin, it appears the silent star-throwers are making a big screen comeback this year.

Effective ensemble pieces about a team or group of people with a common dramatic purpose are generally quite difficult to get right. Recent success stories include the likes of Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven (2001) while classics like The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954) continue to be held up as prime examples of the genre. And so it should come as little surprise that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, brought to you from the director of The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), and Van Helsing (2004), is no Seven Samurai. But then again, it's not Van Helsing either. And that is never a bad thing.

The film centers around two groups, one being a super-secret, super-elite, super-duper task force known as G.I. Joe (referred to colloquially as "The Joes"), and the other being their evil counterparts who will eventually come to be known as Cobra. Through the fiery flames of constant explosive activity lies a feint visage of military moralising - the idea that the soldier is and will forever be the backbone of the military, which is represented by the G.I. Joe unit placing an emphasis on empowering its soldiers, and cannot be mere mindless, moralless killing machines as represented by the brainwashed beta version of the Cobra team. The two teams are constantly set up as being mirror images of each other with equivalent character-types on both sides and even a defection or two taking place as the film progresses. Heck, you only have to look at the layout of the film's promotional poster to see the page split in two, depicting the two sides in connected opposition to one another.

But that's about as deep as it goes. The rest of the film is spent blowing the shit out of anything that seems even remotely combustible in the wake of several rocket-propelled grenades going off inside and around it. And, for the most part, these explosive scenes are suitably entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the male lead, Duke, played by an almost completely charmless Channing Tatum. His inability to emote leaves underwritten scenes all the more distant from hitting their mark, and it's clear that his wooden presence takes its toll on fellow cast members who engage in an uphill battle to elicit some sense of life and vitality from an actor who is barely deserving of the title. Luckily, Sienna Miller's performance as a conflicted seductress goes some way to remedying her male counterpart's insurmountable flaws, and a host of supporting actors including Dennis Quaid, Arnold Vosloo and Jonathan Pryce enable the material to float a notch or two above its pay grade. Even Marlon Wayans as Funny Black Guy...uh, I mean Ripcord...provides a welcome source of character-based entertainment in a film that is otherwise almost completely overwhelmed by its scale.

Ultimately, Stephen Sommers is a director who generally understands the balance between story and spectacle. While there are moments in G.I. Joe in which he struggles to hold onto the reigns of his story and the characters who populate it, he never lets it slip his grip entirely. There is an undeniable boyish charm to the film. It is not the best of its breed, but it is not entirely valueless as a piece of energetic entertainment. Certainly, if I have to choose between seeing an average but actionless thriller like The Taking of Pelham 123 and an average but action packed blockbuster like G.I. Joe, I'd roll with the Joes any day of the week.

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