G.I. No: Stephen Sommers Leaves G.I. Joe Sequel

It's kind of a coin flip for me between Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe for the title of "worst movie of 2009". They're both awful, sure, but in the end the relentless boringness of Transformers might give way to the bottomless stupidity of G.I. Joe as the source of the most frustration for me as a movie-goer in that long-ago period of time. I'm no great lover of the G.I. Joe brand as a whole, childhood cartoon-watching be darned, but I was still hoping for a sprightly exercise and some fun CGI-assisted battle sequences. Instead, we got what was almost literally a children's cartoon on film, replete with hammy acting and poorly imagined action sequences. (This is, of course, coming from the guy who really likes Hulk, so your mileage may vary.) It still made an absurd amount of money, of course, since it was something I hated, and rumors of a sequel have been bandied about for the last year or so. 
 
It would appear, however, that director Stephen Sommers will not be on the merry-go-round for the second time, as word on the street is that he has either been let go or removed himself from the project; this follows rumors of studio unrest with him on the set of G.I. Joe, to the point where he was reportedly locked out of the editing room on the film. Sommers, of course, is something of a maestro of incredibly dumb movies, without quite the level of Michael Bay-like directorial flair to let him blast through the weaker parts of the scripts he works with. 
 
I suppose the problem with his directorial  timeline is that his films have gradually transitioned from "amusingly stupid" ( Deep Rising) to "charmingly stupid" ( The Mummy) to "just stupid" ( Van Helsing) to " I sort glass!" ( G.I. Joe : The Rise of Cobra). That's not a career arc that I would like to be on, personally, but I suppose we can rest in the knowledge that he won't be around to mess up G.I. Joe 2, which, even if it does star that magnificent lunkhead Channing Tatum, is at least going to get an upgrade at the screenwriter position with the inclusion of Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. 
 
No word on a replacement for Sommers yet, but apparently Paramount is actively looking for someone to helm the project, so it's likely that we'll see something in the 2012 timeframe, just in time to usher in the end of the world.