Published: August 12, 2009 07:49 pm         

B-Sides: Knowing is half the battle: This is not your father’s G.I. Joe

TERRE HAUTE — The get-away in “The Blues Brothers,” as Dan Aykroyd once explained, was intended to be the mother of all car-chase scenes. And it was.

Likewise, to label “G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra” an “action movie” is like calling “Shawshank Redemption” “sad.”

The new “G.I Joe” flick drops cluster bombs of “action” on the audience for 118 straight minutes.

Which is not necessarily a good thing. Unless you are inadvertently rendered numb on the way to the theater, the explosions, blasts from high-tech assault weapons, lasers and fire might seem just a tad excessive — even to the toughest 7-year-olds. In “The Blues Brothers,” the car chase with Jake and Elwood bulling the Bluesmobile through a mall with dozens of Chicago cops in hot pursuit was a parody.

“The Rise of the Cobra” is not a comedy.

This is not your father’s G.I. Joe.

The G.I. Joe I remember stood 12 inches tall, equipped with only his government-issue uniform and enough wits and strength to survive in hand-to-hand combat. (Rifles sold separately.) A man’s man, as plastic toys go. At no point did my G.I. Joe don an accelerator suit enabling him to outrun sports cars and absorb collisions with city buses. OK, the accelerator suits were cool. But the point is, this film bears virtually no resemblance to the imagination of 7-year-old boys of the 1960s.

The connection begins and ends with the title.

And that’s fine. This isn’t sacred stuff. We’re talking action figures here. It’s the summer of the recession. Why not deaden a few brain cells and ear drums with two hours of mindless urban mayhem?

(At this point, it should be noted that much of it occurs in downtown Paris.) Of course, the new G.I. Joes — they’re actually a multi-national team of special-ops “Joes,” instead of a lone American, boots-and-canteen G.I. Joe — wreak collateral damage of biblical proportions among unsuspecting French civilians. But who’s counting? Not the Joes. They obliviously plow through and overrun every obstacle between them and the heinous villains.

Those bad guys go beyond the wildest dreams of baby-boomer-era kids. They possess bombs laced with “nanobots,” tiny, computer-activated metal eaters capable of consuming tall buildings in a single meal like, say, the Eiffel Tower. Their ranks include Ana (Sienna Miller), a revenge-driven Barbie-turned-terrorist; her beloved brother, a soldier-turned-mad scientist (so disfigured that she doesn’t realize it’s him); a fiendish arms dealer; and a ninja, who in his ultimate duel shuns the hand-held nuclear weapons in favor of a sword.

It’s like “America’s Got Talent Meets Bruce Lee, The Gladiators and The Godfather on the Starship Enterprise,” except the originals were so much more fun.

I’m no film snob. I like a good, stupid movie. “Anchorman,” “Tommy Boy” and “Airplane” should be mandatory in every DVD collection. But all three of those make me laugh. “Rise of the Cobra” makes you blink. It ends with the most overt signal of an impending sequel ever. Hopefully that encore bags the pyrotechnics and the Team Joe concept, and instead injects something memorable into a plot.

Memory would seem to be of some value when the flick is based on a piece of 1960s pop culture.

The G.I. Joe I got for my seventh birthday could talk. But he could not swim, unfortunately. And on the day I got my new talking G.I. Joe, a buddy and I made an ill-advised decision to send Joe on an underwater mission through a mud puddle in our driveway. His voicebox was rendered unintelligible, as if he was speaking with a mouthful of marbles — kind of like Team G.I. Joe member Duke (Channing Tatum) in “Rise of the Cobra.”

I also had Jarts. I can see it now — next summer’s big action blockbuster … “Jarts: The Plastic Circle of Doom,” featuring WWE stars armed with steel-tipped flu-virus missiles.

Jarts, and G.I. Joe, are best left in the past.

Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.