Cobra has a woman named the Baroness (Sienna Miller) to match Scarlett of the Joes. These women are interesting. They have leather fetishwear and are seductively made up, but are otherwise honorary boys, because us Joe fans don't like to watch a lot of spit-swapping. But because us fans liked the two jive-talkin' robots in "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," "G. I. Joe" gives us Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), who is comic relief, says black stuff, and can't control his high-tech armored suit, so he runs into things. We guess he's a contrast to the calm, macho heroism of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.

The two teams also each have a skilled Ninja fighter from Japan. Why is this, you might ask? Because Japan is a huge market for CGI animation and videogames, that's why. It also has a sequence set in the Egyptian desert, although there are no shots of dead robots or topless pyramids. And Cobra headquarters are buried within the miles-deep ice of Arctic. You think construction costs are high here. At one point the ice cap is exploded real good so it will sink and crush the G. I. Joe's submarine. We thought ice floated in water but, no, you can see big falling ice chunks real good here. It must be only in your Coke that it floats.

There is never any clear sense in the action of where anything is in relation to anything else. You get more of a binary action strategy. You see something, it fires. You see something else, it gets hit. Using the power of logic, you deduce that the first thing was aiming at the second thing.

Yet I say this movie is certainly better than "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." How so? Admittedly, it doesn't have as much cleavage. But the high-tech hardware is more fun to look at than the transforming robots, the plot is as preposterous, and although the noise is just as loud, it's more the deep bass rumbles of explosions than the ear-piercing bang of steel robots pounding on each other.

I mentioned the lack of pyramids. We do, however, see the Eiffel Tower as it is eaten up by nano technology and topples over onto the Place la Condorde. Missiles also strike Mount Rushmore. No, wait! That was during one of the Coming Attractions!

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