SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics, SWAT stands for no-nonsense.

Neither applies to Clark Johnson's bumping, grinding bore of a cinematic exercise in American self-glorification of the most humourless, crass kind.

SWAT is a two-hour recruitment advert for the Los Angeles Police Department's elite unit, wrapped inside a tale of personal redemption, although any story progression is trampled by the speeding rush of crunching metal and deafening gunfire.

Bone-headed training stunts and car and helicopter crashes dominate but somewhere in the wreckage is Colin Farrell in his second film release in quick succession. Last week, he was a charmless violent crook in John Crowley's Dublin comedy Intermission; and this week he is a charmless bad boy with a bad attitude in the SWAT team.

So much for Irish charm.

Farrell's Jim Street and his partner (Jeremy Renner) botch a SWAT job, when a hostage is wounded as the team tries to curtail a bank robbery. He takes demotion on the chin and is given a chance to redeem himself - yes, that old storyline again - by the new tough-nut commando, Sergeant Dan 'Hondo' Harrelson (Samuel L Jackson).

Hondo is not averse to bending the rules himself, and assigns the discredited Street to proving his worth among the new recruits, and so begins a training exercise, shown in tedious detail with no pace and dim dialogue by veteran television director Johnson.

Not one 'character' is engaging: not Farrell, whose vomiting scene is an apt metaphor for this movie; not Jackson, in a performance as irritating as his bank adverts; not rap star LL Cool J, who is allowed to flash his six-pack as if this were a pop promo. The token girl amid the boys with their toys, Michelle Rodriguez, scowls and scowls some more, just as she has done in all her roles.

Is there any originality anywhere in this rehash of a Seventies TV series? Well, the movie's baddie, drug lord Alex Martel (Olivier Martinez) isn't British for a change. He has a French accent instead. Wow, Hollywood, what progress.

Bring back the A-Team. SWAT stands for Seriously Woeful American Tosh.

Updated: 16:12 Thursday, December 04, 2003