Toward the middle of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as two boys fought passionately over a handful of stolen rice — long after scenes in which soldiers had been blasted to bits and a man had been outfitted with a red-hot iron mask, but before scenes in which a man’s head was exploded and another’s head crumbled to dust before our eyes — I turned to the man next to me and asked, “Is this picture rated NC-17?”

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which was produced by the Hasbro toy company to reinvigorate its soldier line, is a super-violent film, perhaps the most violent PG-13 film ever, with practically nonstop action. It’s exhausting. With its cardboard characters and relentless blam-blam-blam situations, I felt as if I’d been playing a two-hour video game.

Although most of G.I. Joe is set in “the not-too-distant future” as Mars Industries is about to introduce its nanomites — tiny critters with an insatiable appetite for metal that can turn a tank into dust in minutes — it actually begins in 1641 France. There, a Scottish member of the McCullen clan is about to be put into that iron mask for double-crossing the warring French, having sold weapons to both them and their enemies. McCullen’s horrifying punishment echoes down through the centuries, which becomes apparent as the movie goes along.

Four centuries later the McCullens are still at it. The latest McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) is the head of Mars Industries, which has sold the nanomites — which can be stopped in their little tracks with the press of a control button — to NATO forces. But in the meantime he has hatched a plan to steal them back and then blame someone else.

This is where G.I. Joe, a fighting force that gets results where everyone else fails, comes in as they try to get back the large case containing the nanomites before they can be weaponized. Working for Mars is the lovely Ana (Sienna Miller ), who does McCullen’s dirty work. She’s always dressed in tight black leather outfits, looking a little like Batgirl, only on the evil side. Things get a little complicated because Ana has a “history” with Duke (Channing Tatum), one of two new G.I. Joe recruits, to whom she was once engaged.

What follows is a series of fast-paced, rampaging adventures that test the imaginations of the CGI creators. One of their better ideas has Duke and his G.I. Joe buddy Ripcord (the amusing Marlon Wayans) outfitted with “accelerator suits,” which look something like the super suits Iron Man wore, but with machine guns at the wrists. The accelerator suits are put into action in an impressive sequence as the G.I. Joe team runs through the streets of Paris, keeping up with a racing SUV in which Ana has the now-weaponized case of nanomites, trying to stop her and creating much havoc on the streets of Paris what with many vehicles going airborne and exploding in the furious mayhem. Along with her white-suited accomplice, known as Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee), Ana threatens to unleash the hungry little monsters on the Eiffel Tower, in McCullen’s mad retaliation against the French for what happened to his ancestor 400 years earlier. I’m not giving anything away here in saying that they do manage to succeed, although not as completely as they had hoped, and the sight of France’s most famous monument toppling over is impressive.

There’s lots going on in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra as the screenwriters try to introduce as many characters as possible from the mythology that was concocted 25 years ago to coincide with the release of the new G.I. Joe action figures. However, Destro, the archenemy of the G.I. Joe pantheon, doesn’t really appear until the end of the film, thus laying the groundwork for more G.I. Joe movies.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the good-looking star of (500) Days of Summer, also released here Friday, is practically unrecognizable in his bizarre getup, although he certainly shows daring and range in a 180-degree turn from what he has done before. But that becomes a real problem for some of the other characters, who are often encased in cumbersome costumes during battle scenes, making it difficult to tell who’s who.

Unfortunately, there’s such little information parceled out about any of the characters that they never go beyond stereotypes. If there’s a central hero to focus on it is Duke, but Tatum is such a wooden actor that there’s no vibe from him to lift the audience and put us in his corner, the way we were able to do with Spider-Man or Iron Man. And so G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which was directed at breakneck speed by Stephen Sommers of The Mummy, remains not much more than an elaborate, violent video game, but one over which the viewer has no control.

**1/2G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Starring: Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jonathan Pryce, Byung-hun Lee, Rachel Nichols.

Rated: PG-13, contains violence, grisly images, brief profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com