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2 stars**
Leave your common sense and orderly life at home; you won’t need it with you when you go see this movie which is completely ridiculous on many levels as it provides high levels of enjoyable entertainment, something so often missing at the cinema these days.

From the opening scene until the fade out you can see where they spent the $170 million budget. The explosions and the special effects now set the new standard of expectations. Anything less than those provided in this movie will be deemed less than acceptable. What was real and which were special effects left a blurred line. At times you didn’t know if the character was in the room or being projected there from elsewhere, such was the mix and match of real and false life.

The screenplay is a collaboration from Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett from a story by Michael B Gordon, Stephen Summers (the director) and Stuart Beattie. All of this is taken without a need to bear any resemblance to the original comic book by Larry Hama. You don’t need to get out your original GI Joe or Action Man figures (was there an Action Girl?) ; this movie just goes where it wants and doesn‘t care whether it has logic or not. Often the good guys are fighting the bad guys and no-one except the screenplay writers (hopefully) have a clue as to who is who and what’s going on. Quite clearly it really doesn’t even matter. We don’t get time to bind with any of the characters although all the main line actors give their characters quality individual variation.

Despite all that I’ve read about Sienna Miller, her wonderful BBC class English accent bodes well against her rampaging and killing activity; she really doesn’t care who gets in her way, former boyfriends and current husband included. She may not match up to Michelle Pfeiffer or Halle Berry’s Catwoman leather close fitting suits, but she shows raw talent for winning any battle, alone or with (temporary) friends. Bruce Willis, in his John McClane days, wouldn’t mess with her. She does an excellent job matching a real force of evil with superior amusement and tongue in cheek expressions. The girl ‘done’ good. I’ll certainly watch out for more of her movies and ignore the press trash about her.

Marlon Wayans is the surprise star of the movie. His highly crafted lines of dialogue provide nearly all the movie’s laughs which arrive frequently and in abundance. The audience liked his jokes, cheering throughout. His comedic timing was brilliant.

So what’s the movie about? It doesn’t really matter. One man wants to rule the world, yet again. Usually you’d say ‘enter James Bond’ but their last effort was very poor and may have lost a large slice of their regular audience for the follow up to this GI Joe.

One point I found amusing; the chief baddie, Dr Who, (Christopher Eccleston) is an Englishman who gets to play with a Scottish accent, while the last Dr Who was played in English by a Scotsman. Perhaps they should have just swapped roles.

Don’t go looking for plot holes as you’ll find many and miss the point of this movie; high entertainment. You just need to sit back and let it ride over you.

Popularity: 9% [?]