Oh, I really did want to like The Losers. In its comic form, by writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock, it was a lethal cocktail of action and politics, the two threaded together with real expertise as an all-too-plausible story about CIA skulduggery unfolds. And as I recounted recently, the opening pages of the screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt were more than promising. So what went wrong?

The opening sequence was a clue. After admiring the tautness of the screenplay version, what’s onscreen adds an unnecessary layer of cutesiness — there were already kids involved, and their presence provided the protagonists with a chance to demonstrate they have a moral compass. That’s all that was needed. Adding aspartame (the nasty sweetener used in many diet products) to that scene underlines that the film comes to us direct from Hollywood, and director Sylvain White, whose CV also includes an installment in the I Have Some Idea What You Got Up To Last Summer sequence, and Stomp The Yard, in which a young dancer’s street moves save the day for…oh, it’s too depressing to contemplate.

Maybe I’m particular conscious of how this stuff works having seen it so expertly played up in Herzog’s superb Bad Lieutenant. In that review I drew attention to ‘maverick’ meaning ‘two days stubble and a preference for classic cars’, and that’s exactly what happens when grizzled team leader Clay gets to drive at some point when they’re after badboy Max, in an old yellow banger that petrolheads get excited by. Hey ho.

Which isn’t to say that The Losers isn’t enjoyable at some levels. In a fairly vacuous way it does deliver kinetic thrills that you’ve more or less seen before, with rapid action against colour saturated backgrounds across the world. And it does that thing which is hard to dislike where you get a group of guys under pressure and they get jokier the more life-threatening things become for them. There’s a level at which that kind of thing is fun — witness the end of The Italian Job, when the coach is perched on a cliff edge, and a laddish chorus of ‘This Is The Self Preservation Society’ kicks in. Mind you, that’s pointing to the limits of such bloky bonding in a gentle fashion. Push the matiness much further and it becomes like those hateful Carling ads, where groups of guys turn down chances for life-transforming experiences because they’re sticking up for the one who’s inappropriately dressed, smelly, or a BNP member.

Would it surprise you if I say all this is delivered to a soundtrack that appropriates some hoary old rock classics and repurposes them, as AC/DC’s back catalogue was utilised for Iron Man 2, and Glee does much more playfully in tv form? That kind of thing is par for the course these days, and that’s an expression that applies more generally to The Losers. It’s not that it’s an especially bad film, just that it brings nothing new to the table, which considering the source material did do — at least by mainstream comics standards (Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light is the real mould breaker, from some twenty years ago) — is a real shame.

Does every movie need to be innovative? Well, it’d be nice if more movies at least dabbled with originality. The biggest and saddest problem with The Losers is there seems little to distinguish it from the forthcoming big screen version of The A Team. And all the irony in the world can’t disguise the fact that the adventures of Mr T and his chums were a crock of shit on telly then, and if they’re any better now, it’s only because of the application of the same Hollywood blanderiser that’s taken the cojones from The Losers.