Long day's journey into fright

HERE'S A new diagnostic guideline. Any film – or TV series or video game or whatever – that uses Journey's Don't Stop Believingfor comic effect almost certainly suffers from severe creative anaemia. To be fair to the originators of this undemanding action thriller, the song's return to ubiquity (courtesy of Glee)would have been incomplete at the time of the picture's making. It is, nonetheless, a little like watching your dad impersonate Ali-G for his golfing chums. That's sooo last year (again).

Mind you, that is not the only trace of 1980s mojo in The Losers. The plot concerns a cadre of variously skilled hard men, only partially attached to the US security services, who, after an act of needless humanitarianism, get stranded in some unforgiving part of South America. Armed only with 400 rocket launchers, a crate of machine guns, eight tons of gelignite and an enviable belief in their own invulnerability, they seek to defeat an evil nemesis and make their way home. One of them is barmy. Another knows about ordnance. A third is older and wearier. Heck, there even seems to be a girl in the mob.

Sound familiar? Yes, a few months before the A-Team movie opens, The Losersoffers us an unofficial retread of that series. The Losersis, in fact, based on a comic book and, framed in imitation of that graphic genre, it makes no concessions to lucidity in its transfer onto the big screen. There's a plot in there somewhere, but it is little more than an explosion delivery device.

To be fair, the action is quite effectively achieved and, viewed as a testosterone-flavoured alternative to Sex and the City, The Losersmust be considered a partial success. Domestic viewers will particularly enjoy the following snatch of dialogue: "CIA has a standing kill order on her, as does Hamas, Sinn Féin . . . pretty much everyone with the exception of Peta wants this chick".

Gerry and Martin could probably cope with occupying the same sentence as Hamas. But the CIA?