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The scenario, scripted by Zombieland's Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, overlaps oddly with that of last week's equally silly Olympus Has Fallen. Both involve North Korea, potential nuclear Armageddon and a president held hostage in a bunker beneath his home. But Retaliation traps the prez in his own White House-like manse somewhere in Virginia, as if to admit that simulating the real presidential abode is beyond the filmmakers' abilities.

And so the movie proceeds, nestling a phony-looking Tibetan monastery amid actual mountains, and staging an absurd nuclear-disarmament conference at what looks like the genuine Fort Sumter. (The symbolism of that location remains inscrutable, but must mean something to someone involved in the production.)

First-time G.I. Joe director Jon M. Chu, who supervised a pair of those Step Up teen-dance movies, rarely trusts his actors to sustain an action sequence. Hand-to-hand combat is supplemented by various high-tech devices that recall the Transformers movies — another toy-derived franchise. Ninja-like warriors swoop impossibly through the Himalayas, battling in midair, while bombs, swords and even about-to-be-dead bodies fly at the audience.

The latter may not be the most tasteless thing in a movie that features a waterboarding joke. But the abundance of projectiles could make innocent bystanders wish that Block would live up to his name and obstruct some of the crud flying off the screen.