In America, Special Weapons and Tactics teams are held in the same reverence in saloon bars across the country as the SAS are over here.

So it must be a bit of a worry to see them botch the relatively simple task of transferring a prisoner across town in the film that bears their name - S.W.A.T.

That they make such a pig's ear of moving dodgy Frenchman Alex Montel (Olivier Martinez) is down to that age-old American catch-all - issues.

Team leader Hondo (Jackson) - the "gold standard of ass-kickers" - is back on sufferance while Jim Street (Farrell) is onside again after demotion for disobeying orders.

At least three of the others can't stand one another and there's also a woman in the crew which doesn't really suit the macho world of the LAPD.

It doesn't help that Montel - more Sacha Distel in a slight strop than a Gallic Al Capone - is offering $100m to any local hood who can spring him from custody.

We first meet the crack law enforcers when they are recruited Magnificent Seven style by Hondo. Except there's only five of them and they're not magnificent.

There's no dialogue as such, just a deluge of police jargon, meaningless acronyms and street drivel: they don't talk as much as shout slogans at one another.

"Sometimes doin' the right thing isn't doin' the right thing," is just one of the ghetto-smart utterances that just sounds plain daft when subject to scrutiny.

It's a bit like the whole movie really: passable action, lots of muscular posturing but, when it comes down to it, nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before.

Tim Evans