The Karate Kid, a tortuously long remake of the 1984 teen classic, takes the story that was set in America and rebuilds it piece by piece in China. Pretty much like the world economy, then. It stars Jaden Smith as Dre Parker, an only child whose mother (Taraji P Henson) is forced to relocate to Beijing after she loses her job at a Detroit car plant.

Dre ain't a happy kid. This could be because his mother seems to have been the only employee from Detroit who relocated. Otherwise, he grumps and groans at having to leave home. He frowns at the overdubbed cartoons. He shrugs with inertia when his exasperated mom asks him to stop dumping his coat on the floor. Then he bottles up after he is bullied at his new school.

This occurs when he tries to chat up a young Chinese violin player Mei Ying (Wen Wen Han). Only in China would you find a 12-year-old girl proudly practising the violin in the schoolyard. Back west, she would be beaten up. In China, it seems you get beaten up if you interrupt the over-achieving of another person. This is why their economy is doing better than our own. It also must explain the motivation of Cheng (Zhenwei Wang), the bully boy who sends Dre to the floor with a series of high kicks. Cheng can't, surely, be motivated by sexual jealousy, in the way that Ralph Macchio's Daniel LaRusso was bullied for winning the attentions of a cheerleader. This is because Cheng, like most of the cast, is a pre-pubescent boy.

As an actor, Zhenwei Wang knows an impressive array of kung fu moves but he has just one facial expression. This is set in the rigor mortis of a growl. He parades into each of his scenes like a pantomime villain about to crush young Dre underfoot. But as Dre keeps getting licked, a curious thing began to happen: I started to side with Cheng. That's it, hit him! Kick him harder! Knock him one in the gut!

Now, I don't usually condone bullying, but the cards are hopelessly stacked against Cheng. Dre will have Jackie Chan teach him to fight. Naturally, he is going to beat Cheng in the tournament he will eventually enter to settle scores. And there's the fact that Dre is played by Jaden Smith, a child actor so smug in his self-awareness he could do with a bit of a dressing-down.

Occasionally, the film asks of young Smith that he play vulnerable. This he does admirably. But his facial expressions are undone by his body language. He walks like he owns the town. I suppose he just can't help it. The producers of the film are his parents – Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. And they do own the town. He is 11 years old and gets to spar with Jackie Chan, while a large section of the Great Wall of China is closed down just for him so he can practise kung fu on it. Presumably you can see his ego from space.

One of the key things you notice about The Karate Kid is there is no karate. As misrepresentations go, this must fall under the trade descriptions act. Karate, of course, is Japanese and China has its own martial arts traditions (and its own tourist sights too, the camera is keen to highlight). The main reason, though, is because of Jackie Chan. He no do karate. He know kung fu. He also no do acting. His janitor Mr Han looks like a sclerotic glob up until the point where he rescues Dre from a beating. He gets to rustle up some chops and comes alive, though he doesn't hurt the kids: he turns their moves back on themselves, so in effect, they beat themselves up.

Just like Mr Miyagi, he too lost a wife and child, and so will come to feel a paternal bond for the fatherless Dre. But otherwise, he does things his own way. He teaches Dre discipline by making him hang up his coat and take it off again and hang it up again and take it off again. Coat on. Coat off. Incidentally, he keeps a car he is restoring in his living room because, apparently, there is no parking on the streets of Beijing. In relation to this, it appears he prefers to wax off on his own.

In one scene, Mr Han watches a fly buzz around his dinner and holds a pair of chopsticks poised in his hand. Then, unexpectedly, he lifts the other hand which contains a fly swat. Such a knowing gesture is designed to appeal to those who have paid to see this film for a nostalgia kick. But there is little in this for adults, just the rehashed tropes of an underdog kids' story.

In 2007, a crap commando director was sent to prison by a military court for a crime (Smokin' Aces) that he most certainly did commit. This man promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by film critics, he survives as a director of fortune. If you have a rubbish script, if no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire... Joe Carnahan.

Twenty-three years after The A-Team was canned on TV (the bread and butter of my youth), Carnahan exhumes the characters to relieve your summer boredom in this daft, barely entertaining adventure. As usual, nobody gets killed. Except, perhaps, the audience. There's Liam Neeson as the mastermind Hannibal, Bradley Cooper as the smug Face, Sharlto Copely as mad Murdock, and Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson as the bad-ass, burly BA. All they are required to do is look and act the part.

There was an inherent simplicity in the original. The A-Team took out bad guys while being chased by military police; when they were cornered in a shed, they could concoct a cannon that fired cabbages. During action sequences, you could tell who did what because you could see the things happen. Here stuff happens but the direction is so incoherent and the editing so frazzled, the film resembles a Jackson Pollock painting.

The action sequences seem to have been written by a child. The A-Team escape from an exploding aeroplane inside a tank while attached to a parachute and manage to shoot down aircraft. Earlier, Murdock flies a helicopter into a deliberate upside-down freefall as he is being chased by a heat-seeking missile-firing military helicopter while BA dangles outside the chopper being held only by the hand of Face. I couldn't really see Hannibal but I presume he was smiling and smoking a cigar. "Overkill is underrated," says Murdock at one point. I'd have to disagree.

The cat-and-mouse plot takes in any number of continents and has no time for character development. But let's be honest, where could the characters go? The only character who has presence is the silver-haired Neeson, and even that's a stretch. His Hannibal is now a metaphysician. "I don't believe in coincidences. No matter how random things seem to appear, there's still a plan." Ah, no. The A-Team is merely a series of random action sequences spliced together. It's a plan that cannot come together.

Joann Sfar's magical-realist Gainsbourg is a biopic of the French singer Serge. Writer/director Sfar draws from his own graphic novel and the results are broad if not barmy. Sfar begins the story with Gainsbourg as a precocious 1940s child painter, struggling with his Jewish alienated identity. He's followed around by a giant papier mâché caricature of himself which acts as a prodding subconscious.

Gainsbourg finds his forte as a musician with low self esteem, but when he finds fame, he makes up for what he lacks in muster with women. Long-legged Lucy Gordon (who sadly took her life soon after) plays Jane Birkin, while Laetitia Casta, with her milky thighs, makes for a fab Bridget Bardot. After a while, you notice how distracted the camera is by all these hot women and you start to wonder what the point of the film is. What begins as a study of life and art becomes an indulgent, listless study of womanising. Eric Elmosnino as Gainsbourg provides a terrific impersonation. With his drooping lip, hawk nose and louche demeanour, it is difficult to tell them apart. Elmosnino's transformation into the haggard bum who dies at 62 is always engagingly convincing. But the film, a little too glib and glam, is never affecting.