What do you know, 'Joe'?

Like hundreds of bad horror films, movies adapted from video games and Jamie Kennedy pictures before it, "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra," which opened last week, didn't get a screening for critics.

Although there may have been calculated reasons for this move, it shows a deeper problem for Hollywood studios: their complete lack of faith in professional moviegoers to appreciate well-executed trash.

Yes, this movie is essentially a two-hour toy commercial.

Yes, at times it seems like a sequel to "Team America: World Police," except with live actors instead of marionettes.

Yes, Dennis Quaid actually says, "When all else fails, we don't," with a straight face.

Yes, "G.I. Joe" would have played a lot better if Sarah Palin was our vice president.

Yes, the bloated-with-visual effects final 30 minutes will make audiences yearn for the realistic clutter-free action and human contact of the Clone Wars.

Yes, this film is best enjoyed if you're an 11-year-old boy -- or a grown-up man who just drank four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

But it's hard to deny that the first two-thirds of "G.I. Joe" is an enjoyable film, especially when graded on the curve of lowered expectations. Compared with other big-budget movies out this summer, it's mediocre. But as a movie that no one thought would be any good because it's based on an action figure that isn't even a foot tall anymore, it wildly succeeds.

The film stars Channing Tatum as Duke, whose onetime true love Ana (Sienna Miller) now leads a group of well-gadgeted terrorists. When her evil consortium tries to steal a warhead filled with metal-eating nanotechnology robots -- which looks suspiciously like a shaken-up can of Mountain Dew -- Duke gets recruited into G.I. Joe, a sort of international SWAT team that includes Quaid as its leader and a cool-looking ninja dude named Snake Eyes.

The whole thing has an "X-Men"-meets-"Top Gun" vibe that might seem really dumb if your favorite movie is "Atonement," but will be easy to groove right along with if you're the type of person who never turns the channel when "Commando" comes on cable.

Stuff blows up. Lots of it. Most of the actors are hot-looking, and the ones who aren't do cool things with swords. And although the 118-minute movie is about 25 minutes too long, the script has a nice self-deprecating feel, without losing its sense of patriotic excess.