Well, it wasn't great, but it was leagues above the first outing.
Dwayne Johnson wasn't exactly the articulate chef with the heavy machine gun that we all knew and loved, but the story behind and the characters seemed a lot more like the GI Joe of the comic books, the GI Joe of the cartoons.
It seemed more like early GI Joe, and early Larry Hama, it seemed more like the era where he was writing a military comic book for a military toy geared towards little boys, rather than the over-the-top gadgets that came in the early 90s.
But the main draw is that the characters seemed more keyed to the comic books, more keyed into the file cards, they seemed to have more of a personality than the last installment, and that is what made Joe fun.