The new movie takes its basic plot from a mid-'80s relaunch of the toys, which gave the Joes an enemy – the evil Cobra Command. In style, the film boils down elements from most of the big action movie franchises of recent times, notably Independence Day, Lara Croft and X-Men. In the process, it deletes any engaging features from those films in terms of character.

G.I. Joe is the latest of these copies, and a clear sign of the end of the empire. It is so bad it makes even the worst of George Lucas's second round of Star Wars movies look good. The original G.I Joe was a line of military toys put out by the US multinational Hasbro during the Vietnam War. They were basically Barbie dolls for boys or, depending on your politics, plastic propaganda for the American military. The name was borrowed from a popular 1945 movie, The Story of G.I. Joe, starring Robert Mitchum. The toys coined a new phrase – the "action figure" – that Lucas would borrow from for his lucrative Star Wars merchandising.

The cast is young, pretty and appalling, but they're just doing what they're told. Most of the men are muscle-bound, the women stacked. They are not selling a story so much as fantasy for recently pubescent gamers, or even younger kids. That audience has been raised on awful dialogue and the kind of deep vocal "acting" that Lucas succumbed to in the late-era Star Wars. This is where good actors make fools of themselves in return for large wads of cash, uttering words that a donkey could have written. Dennis Quaid, Jonathan Pryce, Christopher Eccleston and Sienna Miller are joined by Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in this hall of shame.

In the near future, Duke (Tatum) and Ripcord (Wayans) are soldiers assigned to transport a new weapon from a factory in central Asia. A Scottish arms manufacturer (Eccleston) has persuaded NATO to finance his Nanobot metal-eating technology. High-tech mercenaries swoop down from the sky and steal it, led by a babe in leathers. This is Sienna Miller, making her play for big-time action money-maker, with a ridiculous catwalk prance.

Duke recognises his old girlfriend, Ana. Hankering for payback, the two GIs join a secret international team of super soldiers in an underground training facility in Egypt. General Hawk (Quaid) utters some really awful lines at them, then everyone suits up for a fight. These happen along about every four minutes, with an emphasis on impaling and slashing. The Korean actor Byung-hun Lee floats around the film as a white-suited pretty-boy ninja. Pryce is the American president, with virtually nothing to do in the film but look concerned.



The helmsman here is Stephen Sommers, who has had a successful career using imitation and CG. The Mummy was Raiders plus bandages, beetles and sand, but it was done with energy, pace and humour. G.I. Joe is ID4 without aliens, drained of humour and jacked on action. Few films have blown so much stuff up (including the Eiffel Tower) and wrecked so many cars for so little entertaining effect.