Basically, I think that G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra needed three things to be successful: awesome action, a bad ass Snake Eyes as embodied by Ray Park, and Sienna Miller’s Baroness to be the inheritor for leather-bound cat suit goddess that’s been vacated by Underworld’s Kate Beckinsale. So I guess by own standards, G.I. Joe’s a success. Heinously kept from critical eyes – with few geek-friendly exceptions – till the opening night screenings, G.I. Joe does do one thing that its thematic predecessor, Transformers, could not, and that’s put a human face on the action. Mindless and meandering though it may be, G.I. Joe does gives humanity to the characters, and actually seems to strive to be something more than a toy commercial. Whether it succeeds on the other hand…

No matter what, you have to give G.I. Joe filmmaker Stephen Sommers credit, he tried his best create something, though I know not what. Much of the vitriol has come from G.I. Joe fans that don’t like the alterations made to their beloved characters, or otherwise thinking that from the look of the trailers that the film was shaping up lame. A problem only exacerbated a few months ago when it was rumoured that Sommers had been removed from the project by the producers, which turned out to be untrue but once a rumour’s out there it’s hard to get back. Behind the scenes shenanigans aside, G.I. Joe’s failure stems not from what it doesn’t do, but rather for what it does.

The story starts for some perplexing reason in 17th century France where an arms dealer is fitted for an iron mask as punishment for selling arms to both sides. Then the titles come up. “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” it says because if you had just walked into the theatre not knowing what was playing you’d now be totally confused. The setting is “the not too distant future,” and the doomsday weapon of choice is a nanite warhead that disperses in a cloud of green mist and eats any metal it encounters. You know you’re in trouble when even theoretical weapons feel played out, but hey, it gets the ball rolling. Indeed the silly science of the animated series remains intact; all that was missing was laser guns and android soldiers.

The plot is both simplistic and needlessly complicated. James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) is a weapons developer trying to deliver his new nanite bomb to NATO. The military convoy escorting the weapons, led by future Joes Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), is attacked by Cobra forces led by the Baroness (Miller). Duke recognizes the Baroness as his former fiancée Anna, a little piece of information that gets him on to the G.I. Joe team led by the intrepid General Hawk (Dennis Quaid). Duke, Ripcord and the Joe team made up of Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Snake Eyes (Park), Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) then seek to stop the villainous (and unnamed) Cobra organization from using the nanite bombs to commit certain deeds.

Even harder to find than Cobra’s apparent motivation is two of their key leaders. Eccleston’s Destro is without his trademark silver mask until the end of the movie, although the script spends a lot of time circling its significance. As for Cobra Commander, it’s a case of “flames on Optimus” even in spite of the fact that the normally rock solid Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the actor behind the ventilator and purple monocle. Now I’m not a hardcore fan, and personally if some of the changes turn out positively for the story than who am I to nitpick, but after seeing The Rise of Cobra I have to say that I miss the chrome helmet and Chris Latta’s shrill screeching of “Cobra, Retreat!”

By and large, G.I. Joe gets the job done with some very strong action scenes and enough characterization to not make the whole thing feel like military porn. There’s also a nice balance between characters, as in there’s an ensemble feeling and not just a few characters eating up the majority of the screen time. Don’t mistake that for anything substantive though, so far as your mind goes G.I. Joe is there one minute and gone the next. The action, though well executed, sometimes comes off as a little fake thanks to Sommers’ typically overindulgent use of CG. It’s also problematic that there’s really no clear motivation for Cobra, as the script works diligently to be a prequel, self-contained film, and franchise launcher all in one, probably a bit too long, package.

On the level of being a pleasingly simple summer action film, G.I. Joe delivers. It’s not going to change the world, not that it was ever supposed to I think. But it still boggles the mind that the studio would go to great lengths to hide this from the critical mass despite the fact that their views on this type of movie typically has no bearing on the target audience. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has all the substance of cotton candy, but can you honestly begrudge it for that? Probably not, it accomplishes what it sets out to achieve and is as pretty a plastic as the toy line it’s based on. Chill out, switch off and watch action figures come to life. At the very least the theatre is air conditioned.