By Nicholas Davies

They say hope springs eternal and they must be right. Despite all the obvious signs, I went into ‘G.I. Joe: Retaliation’ thinking, well, you never know … someone might do something interesting with this…

No chance. This is a painfully straightforward real-American-heroes-get-out-there-and-annihilate-international-terrorist-threat story, with nary a twist to be found. The one potential intrigue point – the fact that it’s the US President himself who orders the termination of the elite fighting force known as the G.I. Joes – is deflated immediately: the President has been replaced by an evil impostor (apparently we knew that already from ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’). No corruption whatsover; the lauded post of Commander-in-Chief remains untarnished.

Now look, I’m fine with that. I loved G.I. Joe – the action figure and the animated TV series – when I was a kid, and I didn’t need complex tales of international political wrongdoing in six shades of grey to keep me interested. Big guns, bigger explosions and some buddy-buddy camaraderie on base, and I was more than happy. So you’d think all this movie would really need is for the good guys to come out on top and I’d leave the theatre satisfied.

In lots of ways, the film hits all the marks it should. Lots of things explode. There are some cool gadgets (firefly drones!) and well-executed fight scenes (the sequence of ninjas fighting on ropes dangling from the vertical heights of the Himalayas is pretty great). The performances are uniformly … uh … acceptable. There’s nothing Oscar-worthy here – but then, the actors are mostly portraying a character that began life as a Ken doll with a beard and fatigues. So Dwayne Johnson flashes his big smile and his bigger biceps (to be fair, he does seem more at ease onscreen than I’ve ever seen him); Channing Tatum does his boy-next-door thing; and Adrianne Palicki alternates between curvy feminine and tough-as-the-guys as the moment requires.

The trouble is, the story is really sloppy. Granted, I’m not on top of the franchise enough to know my Zartan from my Firefly – and I didn’t see the earlier film, so doubtless I’m missing some of the set-up. Still, there are so many under-explained threads of narrative that trying to figure out who is where and why and how they got there and why they knew that was where they needed to be becomes impossible. By the time these storylines collide, you’ve shut off your brain and are just looking at the pretty explosions.

Oh, and chuckling at Bruce Willis’s trademark deadpan delivery. At least there are some things you can count on.

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