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"In a Stephen Sommers film, props can be anything as small as a ring or as large as a Humvee. Each is adaptable to being tossed around."

Yikes – make no mistake, GI Joe grabs you by the nether regions and takes you on a full-blooded sensory overload of explosions, fights and absolute automotive Armageddon.

In fact, GI Joe now holds the record for having destroyed the most cars in a movie – a record previously held by The Blues Brothers which totalled 103 cars.

For example, in one sequence, a Hummer is thrown down a traffic-strewn street in Paris. Although filmed in Prague, sending a two-tonne American military vehicle down a crowded street required more than a few well timed handbrake-turns and a whiff of luck.

The stunt team used two cannons on the back to propel the beast down the road, while a guide cable "with a pretty good force on it" was attached to the front to keep everything in line. The result? Loud. Very, very loud.

As one of the stunt co-ordinators remarked, quite matter-of-factly: "It looks like every single car in Paris is flying!"

That statement alone should tell you everything you need to know about GI Joe – everything, and I do mean everything – is liable to being thrown around, beaten up, shot at, blown up or driven over. Nothing is stationary, nothing remains intact, and everything is as in-yer-face as can be.

Executive producer David Womark summed it up: "I think we beat the record, which was The Blues Brothers which had 103 cars wrecked. "I think we actually bought and destroyed over 112 cars".

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