First of all, let’s get one thing straight. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.

No.

The god-damned movie is called Eclipse. Your movie isn’t a “saga” just because it makes tons of money. Now, onto the review.

Everyone is back for what promises to be an Epic Final Showdown with the Cullen family and their uneasy allies, the Quileute werewolves, on one side; and the recurring Evil Redhead, her dupe (Xavier Samuel, who looks like a young Willem Dafoe), and a small army of newborn vampires on the other. “Newborn” as-in freshly turned, not vampiric infants. That’s a whole other brand of movie.

The showdown angle is actually the decent movie hidden deep in the recesses of an all new chapter of this overwrought teenage love story, and while I have praised the previous films for being focused, this one is-by comparison-quite overstuffed. Bella (Kristen Stuart) is still vapid and useless, unable to decide which boy’s emotions she’d rather toy with. I know there’s some subtext here, but seriously, girl, pick one! She’s not sure yet if she loves Jacob (Taylor Lautner), while he’s more or less insisting she loves him but doesn’t know it yet. Edward (Robert Pattison) on the other hand, is acting fittingly like a 100-year-old man. The whole thing builds to its dramatic climax when Bella finds herself succumbing to hypothermia while hiding out from the rogue vampires, and Jacob has to keep Bella warm with his puppy-man body heat.

Eventually Ed and Jake have a little chat.

JACOB: I lurv Bella, even if she is a dumb girl ::ab flex::

EDWARD: I lurv Bella, even if she is a puny hoo-man. ::sparkles::

JACOB: You’re a dick.

EDWARD: No, you’re a dick.

JACOB: ::glowers::

EDWARD: ::glowers::

What’s really irritating about Jacob is that he sounds like he’s 16 years old, but his ripped as all hell, it’s really weird to see.

On top of this nonsense, Eclipse is the edgy flashback chapter of the Twilight movies, revealing the dark and angst ridden origins of two the Cullen Family “children.” One was a confederate major in the Civil War, and the other was some sort of gangster’s moll. There’s also a flashback to the reason why the local werewolf tribe hates vampires, featuring Peter Murphy. Yes, “Cuts-You-Up” Peter Murphy. All of these little vignettes actually add some much needed tension and horror to the story.

Then they remove all that tension by making the act of killing vampires look like breaking statues. During the long-awaited Epic Final Showdown, a whole lot of vampires die, and if it were any other movie, this would have been a scene full of well-earned gore and violence. The choice to not have more than an ounce of blood ruins the tension they built between scenes from the romantic comedy “Everybody Loves Bella.” It even feels like they edited the fights for TV. Honestly, I thought for a second that I needed to rent it on DVD, as this cut sucked. I then realized to my dismay that I was in a god-damned movie theater.

One thing they’re starting to get right when they make these movies is that it’s a comedy gold mine. There is a hysterical scene where Bella’s dad (Billy Burke) tries to give her “The Talk,” and insist she use condoms, because he’s just that clueless. Lesson learned: Always, always, always ask your daughter if she is dating some sort of supernatural humanoids. That’s just good parenting.

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is in way over her head. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattison), the pretty mopey boy she fell for, decides to break up with her the day after her birthday because he’s an awesome boyfriend.

Bella, being an 18-year-old, decides that the break up is the end of the world so she wails like a banshee in her sleep. Her father (Billy Burke ) now forever loathes Edward for giving his daughter what sounds like post-traumatic whooping cough.

Bella starts hanging out with Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner); local Native American, Vidal Sassoon poster boy, and Edward’s arch nemesis. They have an awkward and sad relationship, as Bella uses him so she doesn’t feel alone. She rebuffs his advances, so he cuts his hair and joins a gang whose sole focus appears to be showing off their rippling abdominal muscles. They have an exchange that goes something like this:

JACOB: I ARE TEH KILLAR MONSTER! (ab flex)

BELLA: I’m sorry I used you.

JACOB: RAWR!! (ab flex)

BELLA: I miss Edward! She is so beautiful!

JACOB: (pout ab flex)

Business as usual in Forks, Wash!

Jacob and his new gang of underage underwear models spend most of their time killing the vampires that stray onto their land, one is being the former girlfriend of the guy who tried kill Bella in the previous film. She is unhappy. So much so that she kills veteran character actor Graham Greene while Thom York’s “Hearing Damage” drains the tension out of all the action.

Edward’s hot goth sister, Alice (Ashely Green),  shows up to tell Bella that Edward believes Bella to be dead; so he’s off to Italy to ask Vampire Tony Blair (Michael Sheen ) to kill him, as he can’t go on without Bella. Ain’t love grand?

The Vampire c Council is the best part of the movie. It barely lasts 20 minutes, but Vampire Tony Blair is a sight to behold. He’s unctuous as all get out, speaking Italian and leering at Bella like she was as if she were a pert, firm teenager. . . as everyone else has been doing, really. Dakota Fanning is also here, playing one of those really young-looking vampires. Also present is professional Creepy Kid Cameron Bright , all grown up!  Vampire Tony Blair wants to kill Bella unless the Cullen family agrees to turn her into a vampire. They all shake on it, and then the group gets back in their mystery machine and head heads back to Forks.

Edward swears to never leave Bella again, so he and Jacob have a final face off, but nothing comes of it; they just glower at each other. Edward then asks Bella to marry him. The end! No really, Bella gasps and then they roll credits.

I must praise this movie, however, for having excellent internal continuity. New Moon definitely continues the story started in the first film. Sadly, that story is as a tortuously slow tale of teenagers falling hopelessly in and out of love, which is boring, even when they’re not creatures of the night.

New Moon, like its predecessor, feels completely unnecessary. The film doesn’t stand on its own, as everything that happens was set up in the first film, making it a true sequel like Lethal Weapon 2 …only lame.

Brace yourselves for a startling revelation:

Twilight isn’t terrible. It’s not good, really, but it’s not terrible.

Director Catherine Hardwicke knows her way around the camera, and there is almost no green screen. Instead, she uses the gorgeous Pacific Northwest as backdrop, a very refreshing touch in this day an age. The acting is also quite good, but that’s really the worst part, because the main players are supposed to be teenagers and they do a damned fine job of acting annoying and naive.

Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) is the new girl in the small town of Forks, Wash., moving in with her dad (Billy Burke), and everyone already knows who she is, including mysterious and sexy Edward Cullen (Robert Pattison), i.e. the prettiest “girl” in school.

Bella sits next to Edward in her first biology class, so he freaks out and asks to have the class changed. Bella’s about to ask him what the hell his problem is, but he keeps her from getting crushed by a car. What’s going on? How did he do that? Why is he being such a jerk all the time?…Bella has herself a Google-based research montage, and figures out that Edward is a vampire, which solidly answers at least two of those questions. So they have a conversation like this:

EDWARD: I ARE TEH KILLAR MONSTER! sparkles

BELLA: Snuggles?

EDWARD: RAWR!! sparkles

BELLA: SNUGGLES!

EDWARD: I are teh bad guy. . .

BELLA: So, how ’bout them snuggles?

This goes on in various levels of subtlety and then they decide to start dating.

Everyone around Swan tells her, “That Cullen boy is no good;” including Jacob Black, a local member of the  First Nations who gets in teenage boy glowering contests with Edward whenever they meet.

While all this teen angst silliness has been going on, another group of vampires have been killing people in the area around Forks. One of them bears more than a passing resemblance to Brad Pitt and decides it’s time to hunt Bella after he interrupts the Cullen Family baseball game. I think because he’s an idiot, he believes he’ll get away with trying to kill this girl on his own when there’s a “family” of seven vampires protecting her.

Brad Pitt Lite tricks Bella into meeting him alone and tortures her by breaking her fibula with the hope of driving Edward into a rage. Edward and the rest of the Cullens show up, tear him apart, burn him and save Bella.

She wakes up in the hospital, and they go to prom. That’s pretty much it, really. Nothing in this movie is terribly hurried, which is actually kind of nice when so many other movies are crammed to the gills with characters and subplots within subplots.

Really, the chief offense of this movie is draining the life, pun intended, out of some of the oldest monsters in history. I’m not really sure why we need another Vampire/Human love story, as it’s been done with more gore or more heart in so many other places.

That being said, Twilight is so self-serious it BEGS for Cavalcade. Between the weird subtext of a 100+ year-old having a romantic relationship with a seventeen-year-old, and the oceans of internet hype for and against it, this movie will definitely entertain anyone who has a few drinks and has seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula .

If, for some reason, you are interested:

It’s about goddamned time I had fun watching a movie. The Hollywood adaptation of 80s TV staple The A-Team is a laugh riot, and in a good way.

We start it off right, somewhere in Mexico, where we meet Hannibal (Liam Neeson), B.A. Baracus (Quinten Jackson), Howling Mad Murdock (Sharlto Copley) and Face (Bradley Cooper) in a completely silly but awesome sequence. We jump ahead 8 years (and 80 successful missions) to the final days of withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, meaning it takes place in the future, I suppose.

The boys are tricked by a barely competent, completely evil C.I.A. agent named Lynch (Patrick Wilson),  who dupes them into . . . standing too close while someone else blows up some counterfeit money and the team’s commanding general. That someone else is, in fact, the ultra-competent military contractor Pike (Brian Bloom), the first villain since Ledger’s Joker to pose a credible threat to a protagonist. He’s just a great screen presence and actually presents a real menace.

The plot really isn’t worth mentioning, as it’s poorly done and more than a little silly. There’s actually a reveal that’s straight out of Scooby Doo . What is worth mentioning: this movie is freakin’ hysterical. At it’s heart, The A-Team is a comedy, but unlike most comedies, things explode a lot. There are scenes that are just sublime in their humor, especially those devoted to making fun of the CIA and their legendary incompetence. Between Pike being a rather scary guy and Lynch being arrogant, yet incompetent in a way we haven’t seen since Cobra Commander, their dynamic yields as many laughs as the heroes’ shenanigans.

Patrick Wilson does a fine job as Lynch. He’s the sort of guy you just want to punch in the throat. At one point, he says a video of a building actually being blown up looks just like Call of Duty, which is something a strawberry douche would say.

The action set pieces are absurdly awesome, as well. We’ve all seen the tank falling out of the sky via parachute in the preview, but how they get out of it is a site to behold.

Really, the best part of this movie, much like the Losers, is the characters just being goofy despite their lives being in constant danger. The real fun of this film is the endless string of great lines and the dynamic between the four main players. Even Quinton Jackson does a great job as Baracus, and well, I don’t expect much from MMA guys after the tragedy that was Universal Soldier: Regeneration.

Overall, this movie is worth the price of admission, but only if you approach it in the way it was intended. It is a comedy through and through. Although, unlike the original show, it does have a body count …the 80’s were, of course more innocent times. Couple this with The Losers, and it’s a recipe for a Cavalcade about people who just can’t take being shot at seriously.

If you’re interested:

You can pinpoint the exact moment action movies started to suck as badly as they do today, and that point would be Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever.

Once upon a time, some dude got drunk and described the concept of an “action movie” to another guy at a bar. That guy, already tipsy, went to the local liquor store thinking; “How hard could it be?” He bought a handle of Jack Daniels, drank it, wrote a screenplay in crayon, and pitched it to Hollywood while hung over.

Somehow, he still managed to get this movie produced.

Antonio Banderas plays Jeremiah Ecks, down on his luck and unable find his wife because she got married to the master of evil, Robert Gant (veteran character actor Gregg Henry), a guy who intends to use nano-robots (AGAIN WITH THE GODDAMNED NANOROBOTS!) and Ray Park to do. . . something bad. No one ever says.

It starts out stupid, with Gant sending thugs from the DIA to pick up his son after he arrives home from Europe via a Gulfstream jet. If it doesn’t strain credibility that the kid just got back from Europe on his own Gulfstream, apparently we’re supposed to find the Defense Intelligence Agency scary. They’re the guys who copy-edit intelligence reports. They don’t have goons, and they certainly don’t have an endless supply of masked mooks in “armored” vests that make the Storm Troopers look like they’re behind three feet of steel. In transit, a Jedi Knight named Sever, played by with aggressive blandness by Lucy Liu, shows up and nabs the moppet in the hopes of moving the plot along.

No such luck, unfortunately.

Then some other DIA agents push up on Ecks as he’s polishing a bottle of Wild Goose or something at the local watering hole in Vancouver, Canada. Yes. The whole movie, supposedly chock full of American-flavored political intrigue, unabashedly takes place in Vancouver. They blackmail him back into action and we’re off! The Ecks Vs. Sever thing only lasts for about thirty minutes before they realize that the real bad guy is the one wearing the Nazi-like trench coat.

Cliché after cliché is layered in every way possible. Liu uses ALL guns in slow motion, from the dinky P90 sub-machine gun to the massive M60 Light Machine Gun, made famous by Rambo. All of this is set to the The Crystal Method and bands that sound like them, for reasons probably more commercial than anything else.

The crowning achievement of this movie’s astonishing inability to get anything right is giving Ray Park a heavy speaking role and almost no martial arts scenes. If there’s one thing Ray Park can do, it’s Wu-Shu, and he looks like a complete tool when he’s either using a gun (because he’s a martial artist), or trying to be menacing (because he sounds like Davy Jones from the Monkees).

This movie is the patient zero of terrible modern action. Everything that makes this movie bad has ruined other movies since. At barely ninety minutes you feel you have run some sort of bad cinema marathon. Couple this with another amazingly bad misfire, like Ultraviolet, and you have a recipe for a craptacular modern action night!

Nicolas Cage movies generally fall into in two categories: intentionally funny (Raising Arizona ), and unintentionally funny (The Wicker Man ). However, Knowing is neither of these. Knowing uses Cage as a regular actor to portray a regular guy…and that, my friends, the least entertaining path to take.

It all begins with in 1959 with a Wednesday Adams look-alike (the painfully cute Laura Robinson), with sad eyes and a large forehead, looking very worried. When her teacher presents a time capsule project for her class, the girl hears voices (of course) telling her to write down a series of numbers, instead of drawing the future like she was told.

Fifty years later, physics professor Johnathan Koestler’s (Cage) smarter-than-average (read: amazingly argumentative) son Caleb (Chandler Cantebury) gets the numbers, and things start getting nuts. Koestler figures that a lot of the numbers are the dates and body counts for natural disasters,but he’s not sure what the other numbers mean… yet.

By now we’re expecting a classic Nic Cage style freak-out (“HOW’D IT GET BURNED!?! “), and instead we‘re disappointed by him actually doing a rather decent job with a well-realized character. Koestler and his son have a strained relationship, as his wife died in a hotel fire, and naturally they both miss her dearly. They never talk about things like “emotions” outside of a painfully sweet exchange in sign language exchange, being men and all.

Koestler throws himself into trying to solve the mystery using the “Single Barrel“ Research Method, which involves crawling into a bottle and watching the news for any headlines matching the numerical pattern.  After doing this all night, he sleeps through a whole day and wakes up to his son calling, saying he has afternoon car-pool. CRAP! Off he goes to get stuck in highway traffic, still contemplating what all the numbers mean when he realizes, after looking at his GPS, those other numbers are map coordinates: latitude and longitude... like the one he’s on right NOW. A few seconds after this realization, a 747 crashes, dipping its wing into the Earths’ crust and cutting a trench through that very highway.

Koestler tries in vain to help these people, and we still don’t get that freak out we’ve been waiting for! His next step is to seek out Diana Wayland (Rose Byrn), the daughter of Worried Wednesday from the opening. She too has a daughter (Robinson again). Koestler tries to get Wayland to open up about her dead crazy mother and reveal the secret to life, the universe, and everything.

The exchange begins poorly, of course, but later they hit it off just in time for Koestler to figure out that there’s a massive Solar flare heading for Earth and everyone’s going to die unless. . . well, nothing. You can’t really stop the sun from reducing the Earth to a heavy metal album cover, but the movie still has forty-five minutes to go. What happens is a half interesting, half Deus-Ex Machina-but with a fiercely depressing twist.

Overall, this movie suffers from a case of “Not Quite Enough-itis.” While director Alex Proyas (I, Robot , Dark City ) is not short on directing skill or adorable brunettes in various stages of life, the plot is pretty much “figure out the code, realize it’s hopeless and do NOT give us a Nicolas Cage Freakout in spite of this.”  It’s competent enough, but asks heavy questions and presents some crazily optimistic answers, playing it fairly straight the entire time with no zany antics and few ludicrous moments. As such, it might not work for a Cavalcade, so go with NeXt instead.

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The Setup

While we’ve never devoted a Cavalcade to a single actor, there is no doubting the greatness of Bruce Willis. Born in 1955, Willis is the son of an American soldier and German Bank Teller, and at that time-well-WWII was just yesterday, so he is the product of a hope for a better world.

Willis overcame a stutter in high school, worked as a security guard for a nuclear power plant, worked as a private investigator, and finally was able to wrestle the American Dream to the ground, punch it in the head and get it to cast him in something. Yes, Bruce Willis is the Father of Modern Action Cinema. But, could he also be. . . A Messiah?

A man born of two very different cultures, Willis overcame personal handicap and personal danger to go onto fame and fortune and a degree of humility unseen in Hollywood since its Gold Age?

Yes. There is a promised land, and if we follow the example of Bruce Willis, we will find ourselves there. His Gospel is available to all (for 3.99 a pop a Blockbuster). Hard work, dedication, a lack of self-seriousness and guns. Lots of them.

The Formula

Write a screenplay, give it Bruce Willis, film the result. It’s not brain-science, people.

• Something will blow up. Willis always manages to blow something up or at least set it on fire.
• Willis will get beat up. Established in Die Hard, Willis takes his lumps in every movie he’s in, proving he can take it as well as dish it out.
• There will be one-liners. Willis has a line delivery style somewhere between the old Catskills style and a world-weary cop
• Willis will always play a tough guy. Even when he’s not a tough guy, he’s still pretty tough.

The Menu

In addition to our typical selection of chips, beer, liquor, and snacks-there will be:

The Booze: The Rusty Nail

• 1 1/2 oz Scotch
• 1/2 oz Drambuie
• 1 twist of Lemon peel

That’s right, a manly drink for a ridiculously manly event devoted to the manliest of men, the Rusty Nail. A hard, mean, but surprisingly smooth cocktail whose secret ingredient is moxie.

The Food: Pizza and Wings

Seriously, nothing fancy here for our hero Bruce Willis. He keeps it simple: protein and carbs so has plenty of muscle energy to wipe out a whole legion of goons.

The Movies

Hudson Hawk (1991): Willis made this extremely silly and fun movie coming out of his high flying years of the 80’s. It universally panned by uncaring public due to being a very silly movie about the thief named Eddie who sings songs with fellow thief Tommy (Danny Aiello) during capers, until he is roped into doing a job for the CIA by his old nemesis George Caplan (James Coburn), who is actually working for The Mayflowers (Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard). Willis made this picture for the fun of it, and if you approach it as intentionally fun, well, it’s hysterical.

Color Of Night (1994): Willis decides to play a more subdued role as a psychologist who is traumatized when one his patients commits suicide after he more or less tells her to do so. He decides to go into therapy, not learning from his own mistake, and meets a gaggle of silly stereotypes. He also begins dating a nymphomaniac named Rose (Jane March) who provides that special kind of healing described by Marvin Gaye. A deliriously weird “psychological thriller” with an absurd plot twist and Ruben Blades, this was a Showtime staple for years.

Suggested Alternatives

Planet Terror (2007): Willis plays a rough and tough lieutenant in charge a platoon of soldiers who melt if they don’t get their Zombie Gas.

Die Hard (1988): The Granddaddy of Modern action, and the movie that elevate Willis to well deserved stardom, this is a classic.

Armageddon (1998): Michael Bay’s magnum opus of ridiculously bad action movies. Asteroid meet Earth. Earth, meet asteroid.

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How do you make a Sci-fi movie these days? 1 oz super powerful aliens, 1 oz environmental message, shake well, garnish with nanomachines.

Everything goes to hell the day astrobiologist Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) summons the Goblin King to take her son (Jaden Smith) away. Instead, she gets Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), who doesn’t take the child, but rather decides it’s time to wipe out humanity to preserve the Earth. He doesn’t even sing about it, which is kind of a bummer.

Klaatu shows up in a rubber organic space suit, and some idiot decides the best way to communicate with a brand new life form is with a bullet. This pisses off a giant Sentinel thing and sends out a wave of pain, giving the unarmed people a chance to medevac the alien before it molts into Keanu Reeves. Klaatu then has a meeting  with the Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates), who finds that while he’s not openly hostile, he doesn’t recognize that Earth belongs to humanity. Turns out all this polluting we’ve been doing is bad, and somewhere there is a council of beings who aren’t too happy about it, as the number of planets in the universe that can support complex life is quite limited.

The fact that this never seen council even thinks that shows the screen writer did his job. The dialogue is sharply written and well delivered, and they also didn’t do anything stupid like cast Tara Reid or Denise Richards as scientists. It’s pretty fascinating to see a believable sequence of events that may surround an alien encounter. This is embodied in the performance by Kathy Bates, who accuses the alien who just landed on earth-you know from another galaxy-of violating U.S. air space. Yeah. Not seeing the big picture. The second time she says that historically, when two civilizations meet, the more primitive one is either enslaved or destroyed. Now you’ll pardon me, but if a super-advanced alien race gave us the option, I’d vote for enslavement and immediately begin planning a Spartacus. Pick you battles, I say. But I digress.

So Klaatu meets with his contact, an operative who has lived on Earth for 70 years and the dude pretty much says, “yeah, wipe out humanity, except that I lurv them, and you’ll never understand.” This conversation is mostly in Chinese, and Reeves shows that his accent is quite impeccable.

The rest of the movie is more or less Klaatu learning what love is so he will spare humanity from a nasty death by nanomachines. There are a few veryeffective scenes, and some more good acting from Jaden Smith, but really it’s just sitting through one boring-as-crackers effects sequence after another to see how they arrive at the conclusion we all know is coming. So while It’s is pretty well done, it has a heavy-handed seriousness (John Cleese even makes an appearance that doesn’t involve being funny). but with the right crowd you’ll probably be able to pull some laughs from the material. Professional Cavalcaders only need apply.

You know you’re in for it when a pair of thugs break into King Leonidas‘ … er, Clyde Shelton’s (Gerard Butler)  home and kill his wife and daughter quite graphically in the first two minutes of the movie.

Then a hotshot attorney, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who knows the law well enough to know that you apparently have to bend over backwards to get any real justice, makes a deal with the actual killer to send his accomplice to death row. But fortunately, Shelton is a man who plans. If he wasn’t, the movie would only have been about ten minutes long.

We jump ahead ten years later to the execution of the guy who didn’t actually kill anyone that Rice sent to death row. Unfortunately, somebody messed something up so he dies worse than the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark .

Shelton then kidnaps the real murderer and cuts him into 23 pieces. When you successfully get away with carving a dude up like a Thanksgiving Turkey, that should make the point well enough. However, Gerard Butler has penchant for playing absurdly violent men, and, well… here we are. The cops, including Colm Meany, are helpless due to some legal weirdness. Next, he kills the attorney who got the actual murderer off, you know the one he ALREADY killed into little pieces.Then he kills another 10 people with a mix of carbombs and a nifty remote-controlled combat robot.

Let’s just recap real quick: After killing the ONLY two people involved in killing his family, Shelton kills almost a dozen other people to make the point that the legal system is broken. This is kind of like burning a cross on your lawn to make the Ku Klux Klan look bad.

The movie is beautifully shot throughout, mostly on location in the wonderful (and appropriately crime-ridden) city of Philadelphia, by director F. Gary Gray who also gave us the classic Friday and the superficially cerebral The Negotiator among other films.

Law Abiding Citizen is one those movies that’s sure to spark a conversation about the nature of vigilantism, before you realize you just watched a film where the guy from Bait was the chewy moral center. You could just easily pair this off with another super-violent Gerard Butler film, or you could throw the audience a curve ball and show them P.S. I Love You , one of the sappier movies in recent years.

This film is not so much a movie as it’s a series of vaguely related action set pieces with characters spewing catch-phrased references to the old cartoon and half remembered bits from the magazine article the writer snorted cocaine off of before the pitch meeting.

After a stupid flashback related to the main villain, but not related to rest of the film in terms of  tone, Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are in Kyrgyzstan, try to transport a dangerous nanotech weapon made by James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston).  The bad guys try to steal it and get thwarted by Duke with assistance of Snake Eyes (Ray Park, blissfully silent) and several other super troopers.

The “Joes” ask Duke for the nanite super weapon, to which he says, and I quote: “I’m signed for them!” but Dennis Quaid insists they give up the weapon. They eventually do on the condition they get to join this wacky international club house of do-gooders.

Meanwhile, the villains are plotting to take over the world with nanotech, specifically the Nanomites^TM and replacing the American president (played by a British guy, Jonathan Price ) with professional impostor Zartan (Arnold Vosloo). Nanotechnology, as we’ve said, is fast becoming to modern movie plots what ACME was to Wile E. Coyote. They even use it to enhance their shock troops, who all dress like the psychos from the god-awful video game Army of Two .

G.I. Joe, a top secret organization was assembled from the best military members in the world.  They train in a massive top secret facility in the Sahara Desert and you can’t have a facility like that without a stupid training montage.

In addition to a ton of errors in continuity the dialogue is mostly just buzz word laden gobbledygook. At one point the bad guys go on a mission to “weaponize” a war head.

Let that sink in.

The final battle of this movie takes place deep beneath the North Pole, and after a special guest appearance from the Coke-A-Cola polar bear, the Joes lay the C.G.I. smack down on Cobra in what could be one of the dullest final battle sequences since the Gungans won the Battle of Naboo . Speaking of Cobra, you know who plays Cobra Commander in this movie? Joseph Gorden Levitt. Yes. The indie film super-star. I assume he approached it the same way a lot of us would have: “Hell yeah I’ll do a G.I. Joe movie! I loved that show when I was a kid!” signed paperwork sight-unseen, and now here we are.

Unlike previous G.I. Joe features, this one has a body count. A big one. I like how the movie is terribly silly with it’s Scottish stereotyping (“You tossed the caber out of the park!”), it’s bad makeup on the females-especially Scarlet (Ladies pinch, whores use rouge.) But almost 400 people die during the course of this picture, and there is no gravitas what so ever. This movie deserves all the mockery you can throw it, and along side the Transformers movies you’d have a great cavalcade on your hands.  You could call it “Pillaging Our Childhood,” if that didn’t sound all kinds of wrong.