G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Directed by Stephen Sommers

(PG-13)

*

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hasbro’s line of toy soldiers comes alive to save the world.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is the “loudest, flashiest, ­silliest, and longest blockbuster in a summer full of long, silly, flashy, loud blockbusters,” said Dan Kois in The Washington Post. Just when we thought action films couldn’t get any worse than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, here comes one that’s as “mindless as a laser-guided missile, and as purpose-driven.” This film, inspired by Hasbro’s Real American Hero line of toys, ­follows a team of G.I. Joes as they save the world from a couple of evildoers. I’d provide more plot details, said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone, but “this mercilessly incoherent, galactically stupid movie left me too numb to type.” What we have here is the “next phase of Paramount’s ‘cash for clunkers’ campaign.” The Transformers sequel cost the studio $200 million, and this wreck cost another $175 million. Both look “shockingly crappy,” yet both have done big box office. The “collateral damage” is the audience, said Richard Corliss in Time. Pummeled into submission, poor filmgoers will find themselves ­getting dumber by the second.