Too busy, allegedly, trying to make us healthier, wealthier and wiser to bother tackling one of the great lingering outrages perpetrated against the Scottish people – Hollywood’s abuse of our accents.

In the dock this week is Stephen Sommers’s GI Joe, a picture so daft it shouldn’t be allowed out on its own. Besides crimes against plot, character and reason, there are several accent offences to be taken into consideration, most of them perpetrated by Christopher Eccleston. Make note of that name and add it to the list of shame which includes Mel Gibson, Robin Williams and Scrooge McDuck.

The former Dr Who and son of Salford plays McCullen, arms dealer and proud son of the McCullen clan, who can trace their ancestry back to 1641. We know this because Sommers, the director of The Mummy series and an alternative historian if ever there was one, opens with the tale of old McCullen the gunpowder merchant who made the mistake of selling to both sides and getting caught.

Cut to modern times and the arms shenanigans are still going on, only this time it’s nano-technology-driven warheads causing the bother. (See: Prince Charles was right all along.)

The warheads are in the care of US forces when a team of leather-clad desperadoes, led by Sienna Miller’s Baroness, swoops in to steal the goods. It’s no mean feat swooping when your costume is as tight as Miller’s, but she fulfils her contractual obligations.

Desperate to get the weapons back, the US sends in an elite force known as GI Joe (Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity), whose ranks have been boosted by the arrival of Duke and Ripcord, played by Channing “Rippling” Tatum and Marlon “Muscled” Wayans. There’s history between Duke and the Baroness, one so troubled that it was responsible for turning Sienna’s hair from blonde to brown. Imagine.

Are you hooked yet? Are you ready to ignore the absence of a coherent story, the lashings of sub-standard CGI and performances so pine-like they make a chest of drawers look like Larry Olivier?

You might well be. Summer, after all, is traditonally when cinemagoers like to let their brains take a break. But even if you can swallow all of the above – and did I mention Dennis Quaid as a US general who is inexplicably in and out of a wheelchair with a force no continuity girl could apparently stop? – there is the matter of those accents.

Eccleston, playing McCullen like a cross between Begbie and Ernst Stavro Blofeld, has a turn of phrase straight out of Brigadoon, with such gems as “You’ve thrown the caber clear out of the yard!” issuing from his lips. One can assume no actual Scots were harmed, or involved, in the crafting of that line.

Sommers and his writing team of Stuart Beattie (Australia, Pirates of the Caribbean), David Elliot and Paul Lovett are not done yet. At one point, Ripcord is forced to fly a stealth aircraft that’s voice-activated. No problem, you’d think, English being the lingua franca of most voice-activated weapons systems. But oh dearie me, no. This plane, made by McCullen, will only respond to “Celtic”.

What’s that, you’re wondering. Is it a long-lost language invented by Kenny Dalglish? Mebbes aye, mebbes naw. A mother tongue fathered by Neil Lennon? Is it, perchance, Gaelic? Whatever it is, this ancient dialect handily coined a word for “eject” long before such a concept ever existed.

It’s all meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s not very well done tongue-in-cheek. The jokes play a very distant second to the relentless, brainless action and whatever wit is in evidence is strictly of the half-measure kind. The characters barely get a look-in either, although what little we see of them is more than enough. Miller’s Baroness, while meant to be an alluring bad-ass, comes across as just plain narky.

Like the Transformers series with which it shares a producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura,

GI Joe is an all-out assault on the senses that will delight any boy whose age matches the 12A certificate and baffle those a nanosecond older.

Again, like the Transformers, GI Joe started out as an action figure, then became an animated series, a comic book and now a live action movie. From plastic to film: the origins of the money-making species that is the modern franchise movie. Darwin couldn’t have ordered it better.

Judging by the shameless way a sequel is cued up, the survival instinct in this one is strong. Despite the money spent and the fun the cast are clearly having, GI Joe is an enterprise lacking in charm. But with Transformers taking £800 million worldwide and counting, it’s a fair bet the similarly calibrated Joe will report for duty again soon. Write to your MSP now.

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (12A)

**

Dir: Stephen Sommers

With: Christopher Eccleston, Sienna Miller, Dennis Quaid