Entertainment

‘G.I. Joe’ sequel is better than the first

The first one was a G.I joke, but the sequel “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” has enough hoo-ah to bring a satisfying blast of blockbustery summer to dreary March.

Wisely ditching the director, the writers and most of the cast of the freeway pileup that was the first film, this one sticks to business: ninjas, machine guns and international super-commandos with stripper names. Jinx, Jaye and Duke (Channing Tatum’s character, not that he would ever take his clothes off for money) are all about sneaking into heavily fortified enemy camps and saving the world via deployment of precisely targeted catchphrases. “Check, check!” “Hell, yeah!” “Drive it like you stole it!”

At the start, Dwayne Johnson (who somehow managed not to be in the first one) and Tatum are buddy soldiers who blow away bad guys in North Korea then invade Pakistan after the assassination of its president to secure the nation’s nukes on behalf of the US president (Jonathan Pryce) — who, as we found out at the end of the excruciating first film, is actually evil Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) in disguise.

So the president is an impostor who starts giving peacenik speeches about a nuclear-free world. Psychopathic megalomaniacs are bad enough, but this guy is starting to sound like Jimmy Carter.

Zartan and others from the malevolent Team Cobra keep the real president alive in an underground bunker, though, just to have someone to chat with about their malevolent scheme. Occasionally they deliver political commentary. One guy whomps the pres upside the head, then says, “That’s for the tax hike!”

Meanwhile, with the assistance of the indestructible Firefly (Ray Stevenson), who hurls robo-lightning bugs that blow up like grenades, the masked evil Cobra Commander busts out of his underground prison and returns to power in the company of his chief ninja Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee), who is working both sides of the ledger.

Storm winds up stunned, zipped into a body bag and carried around like a lunchbox for perhaps the best of the many nifty action scenes: good ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and his partner Jinx (Elodie Yung) swoop along the sides of a mountain on climbing ropes fending off the sword attacks of the Cobra team’s junior henchmen.

Back in the states, the Joes’ top lady commando, Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) decides there’s something fishy about the way the president has been acting lately and resolves to get a swatch of his DNA. To get close enough to snag a hair off his jacket, she puts on a flame-red dress and pretends to be a Fox News Channel reporter. “I guess that’s why you’re so fair and balanced,” Pryce says, eye-bonking her.

The loose, one-liner-heavy script (from the writers of the very funny “Zombieland”) matches up well with the action, which is ridiculous but not senseless. It’s fun instead of gory, and the look (which resembles a classic James Bond film) is an improvement over the aggressive ugliness of recent shoot-’em-ups such as the last “Die Hard” and “Expendables” movies.

Both of them, like this one, featured Bruce Willis, but Willis is at his relaxed best this time. He’s the original G.I. Joe, the general who gave the team its name but is now retired in suburbia. Those burbs give the movie much of its wit and a “True Lies”-like grounding that makes it relatable: Battle-forged Duke is terrified of nothing so much as baby-sitting his friend’s kids on karaoke night, and at General Joe’s house, you simply flip up the range top to discover a cache of automatic weapons. (Grenades the size of limes, of course, are hidden in the fruit bowl.) During downtime, the guys do things like try to blow the birthday candle off a cupcake at 20 yards, and in battle they vow to “make it home in time for ‘Top Chef.’ ” Without turning into a kids’ movie, the film has a light touch that is a welcome replacement for the humorless, roid-rager bloodlust of many an R-rated action flick.

In the great big whomping climax, London gets flattened (no great loss; the place is about as vital as St. Louis these days), a man walks away from a fireball (you gotta respect the classics) and General Joe brandishes the pearl-handled pistol that once belonged to Patton. In a firefight, he is asked if he is all right. Not really: “My cholesterol’s a little high,” he says. Sergeant, get this man some Lipitor, double-time. John McClane is over but General Joe is just getting started.