Question: How do you make a totally unoriginal premise even unoriginaler? Answer: G.I. Joe 2! Yeah, man! Because I live under a very large boulder, I've been under the impression that G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra was some kind of slow-burning, epic, Oscar-groomed health insurance narrative in the urgent vein of The English Patient. And that, at a rambling 118 minutes, it was about destitute people needing medical care but finding themselves to be otherwise uninsurable. And so they turn to an ethically conflicted anti-hero in Ryan Gosling, who is later forced to square off against Meryl Streep in order to fix America's Health Insurance Crisis. But no. That would be too precious for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

'Twas simply a flick about babes 'n' bombs. And this flick about babes 'n' bombs grossed over $54 million this past weekend. So now, because most of us were terrible moviegoers -- or maybe because it was between this or Paper Heart -- Hollywood will now give us a second big-screen helping of the same stuff. And what kind of world is so unfair as to make Bring It On sequels straight-to-DVD while assailing the big-screen with G.I. Joe sequels?

But to add insult to injury, apparently this flick was released in the kingdom of Bahrain before it was released in America, begging the question, are the G.I. Joe heroes all-American? Well it doesn't matter what we think because Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller are contractually obliged to return to the film. And as helpless consumers of popular culture, we're contractually obliged to weather the hoopla and hubbub around such a thing.

But for some, like director Stephen Sommers, this is a chance for him to really crack his knuckles and show off his craft. In this riveting sequel, he hopes to explore the mythology behind G.I. Joe's elite military team. Hopefully he'll leave no stone unturned to that end.