Only two action-adventure directors in Hollywood offer audiences pure uncynical fun, guilty of neither bloated fauxteur self-indulgence or rabid pandering to the American military empire.  Robert Rodriguez, whose concoctions range from whiz-bang kids’ stories to bloodspattered action comedies, is one.  The other is Stephen Sommers, who made his name on “Deep Rising” and “The Mummy” franchise.  Sommers adapted “Huckleberry Finn” and “Oliver Twist”, as well as “The Jungle Book” for Disney, and it’s unsurprising that his ‘adult’ films are really just stories for children involving more expensive toys.  Toys are exactly what “G.I. Joe” consists of, based on the Hasbro line from the Eighties (which updated the classic dolls from the Sixties).  The subject matter here is exactly suited to the director’s talents and vision.  The film is big, fast, loud, dumb, and a lot of fun; summer movies used to be like this before they were turned over to focus groups.

To watch “G.I. Joe” is to understand exactly why Michael Bay’s “Transformers”, also based on Hasbro toys, exasperates and appalls.  Every scene in Bay’s films oozes with sleaze like a leaky ‘59 Chevy.  Bay’s attempt at a “human story” is insulting and ridiculous, and the robots seem to have been given cinematic life in order to carry racial stereotyping and fart jokes beyond the stars.  More than any of this, “Transformers” is blatantly enslaved to an obsession with the U.S. military and its advanced hardware, gleefully stirring together cars, girls, and big explosions in a steroid cocktail  glorifying modern warfare.  “G.I. Joe” would seem to offer even more of this, except in Sommers’ childlike vision the toys bear so little resemblance to reality that any aggrandizing of the U.S. war machine is purely accidental.  There’s no “Team America: World Police” action here.  The Joes are based in Egypt.  The team is made up of soldiers rounded up from every country in the world.  Americans run the show, but under the aegis of NATO and the UN.  The villain is an arms dealer from Scotland.

These details don’t matter much, anyway, because like all the other details in the movie they fall away in the howling windshear of Sommers’ hurtling narrative.  Crucial to shutting off your mind and enjoying this sleek carnival of futuristic gadgetry is the spirit in which everything unfolds, the imaginative source from which the racket springs.  Regardless of the millions spent in CGI overkill, somewhere in Sommers’ mind, you imagine, are original storyboards that look like Victorian-era wood-cuts from a Jules Verne novel; Bay’s storyboards are ripped from Penthouse and Guns & Ammo. Slow-motion in a Sommers’ film is coming up for air; in Bay it’s like a hair metal crotch-grab.  The token babe, Scarlett (Rachel Nichol), is a genius with eye-popping D-cups but later in the movie you mostly appreciate Nichol’s dimpled smile as she warms up to Ripcord (Marlon Wayans); in Bay’s film Megan Fox is a Maxim centerfold passed around a rambunctious locker-room.  And so on.  Even in megabudget blockbusters made to sell toys and sodapop, directors matter.

This isn’t to say “G.I. Joe” doesn’t have glaring blemishes.  The film has no real plot, relying solely on a MacGuffin, a shipment of nano-technology warheads that erode metal; no real characterization that goes beyond descriptive nicknames like “Duke” and “Ripcord”; and scant in the way of action staples like one-liners, thrills, or ooh-and-ahh moments.  It lacks an appealing star, as “The Dark Knight” and “Iron Man” gave us.  The music is forgettable.  The kung fu and swordfighting are pedestrian.  The effects are barely this side of Saturday morning cartoons. 

So what’s to like?  In any other decade I’m not sure I would give “G.I. Joe” more than a two or a three rating, but in the post-“Bourne Identity” wave of attempted realism in spy and military films—the crunchier and bloodier the fighting, the more cynical the politics, the better—I enjoyed the sheer silliness of the technology, the fiendishness of the villains, and the unfussy depthlessness of this corker.  In a time where the guy in the seat next to you can hijack your plane and use it as a cruise missile, a return to masked villains, cackling and plotting world domination, comes off as a quaint, charming throwback.  The contrast is striking and entirely in Sommers’ favor.

For example, Sommers sets up the back-story of Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow, dueling ninjas, with a couple of flashback sequences to their boyhood acquaintance.  They first meet as kids when Snake-Eyes, a cute street urchin, breaks into Storm Shadow’s temple/dojo/Ninja Boys Town to steal some rice.  Snake-Eyes is taken in and trained.  Soon they become rivals. Snake-Eyes moves to the top of the class.  Storm Shadow kills the kung-fu master who favors the brash American usurper and runs off to join the forces of darkness. Onscreen, the backstories are revealed faster than it takes to read these sentences. Sommers gets to the point, whereas in “Kill Bill” Quentin Tarantino’s kung-fu training flashback required almost a film in itself and was more an excuse to play with B-movie tropes than serve the primary story. Sommers’ style is more like a comic book, not another boring film homage to midnight movies nobody cares about.  He’s a pasticheur, possessing at least a modicum of discipline, using new cinematic technologies to spin what passes as true pulp fiction in today’s market.

What else can one say of “G.I. Joe”? There are super accelerator suits, the bad guys hide out under the North pole, an enemy plane only works with voice commands in Celtic (what’s the Celtic for “Ejector Seat”, by the way?), an invisible camouflage suit, the Baroness (Sienna Miller as a passable Kate Beckinsale substitute) compliments a woman on her shoes on the way to destroying the Eiffel Tower, and the Joes deploy an aquatic surveillance device disguised as an Arctic fish—you know, manufactured just in case there’s ever a need to infiltrate a school of fish to spy on a submerged terrorist bunker under the polar ice caps.

There are delightful details like Scarlett figuring out where the Cobra base is located using time of day and the length of Destro’s shadow on the ice, a bit of pseudo-educational fluff right out of The Hardy Boys. Snake-Eyes can’t shoot his way through the armor plating on a car, so he stabs it with his sword instead (must be Hanso steel). Sommers crashes enough cars in a Paris chase sequence to raise metro insurance rates by 200%. Scarlett’s crossbow shoots bolts that blow off heads like popping champagne corks. A Moroccan Joe named Breaker uses electricity to read the memories from a dead man.  Joseph Gordon-Leavitt’s Cobra Commander is a slithery science villain with a wicked roving eye, arched eyebrows, and a hammy hiss straight from the Universal backlot. These flourishes make up for “G.I. Joe”’s senses-deadening special effects and will give any fan of boys’ adventure tales a big goofy grin.