I can't help but pity the fools

Directed by Joe Carnahan. Starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Jessica Biel, Patrick Wilson, Gerald McRaney, Henry Czerny 12A cert, gen release, 117 min

THE A-TEAM:THERE'S NOTHING worse than forced jollity. You know the sort of thing.

You’re lying in hospital with a perforated ulcer and some clown – I mean literally a clown – comes in and begins constructing balloon animals and doing broad impersonations of 1970s newsreaders. There’s a reason why Patch Adams has become a euphemism for waterboarding.

Does this have anything to do with The A-Team? Well, almost. Throughout this painful, confusing updating of a passably entertaining 1980s TV show, you get the sense that the cast are trying far too hard to inject levity into a poisonously doomed enterprise.

Sharlto Copley, star of District 9,makes a gurning, shrieking menace of the certifiably insane Murdock. Bradley Cooper, playing the allegedly charming Face, wears the off-centre smile of a man who has just learned that his name has accidentally been wiped from the sex-offenders register.

And Liam Neeson? Oh dear, oh dear. In the recent action hit Taken, the Ballymena man proved he could carry off the wounded, numb action hero: the Alain Delon of Le Samouraïmixed with Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants. Playing the quip-friendly, irony- charged Hannibal Smith (George Peppard in the TV show) Neeson has, however, never seemed further from his comfort zone.

When, later in the year, the cold weather arrives, buy the DVD and fast-forward to the point at which the Oscar-nominated star of Schindler's Listhas to shout "Adios, mother . . . [dialogue indecipherable]". The warm glow of sympathetic embarrassment will allow you to turn off at least one bar on your electric fire.

So, what's the ghastly thing about? Beats me. We have become used to action scenes that make no sense in low-brow summer blockbusters, but Joe Carnahan, director of the horrid Smokin' Aces,cuts with such head-spinning rapidity that even the simplest conversation becomes impossible to follow.

Having seen the series, you will understand that a group of disgraced soldiers are working together to clear their name. The rest of the plot, however – a lot of which takes place in Germany, of all places – is more bewildering than anything in Inception, Last Year at Marienbad or My Big Book of Partial Differential Equations.

That Dukes of Hazzardmovie has just lost a bit of its sting.