"I think you all know I'm from New York City," Huey announces, playing the big man who makes a little joke; Fun Lovin' Criminals have been milking their cuddly, wise guy schtick to a point way beyond camp for years. To be fair, all three Criminals seem perfectly amiable, but singer Huey Morgan in particular has become an icon of transatlantic masculine cool, the boy the other boys look up to because Huey talks the talk. In between songs, a gruff chant of "Huey, Huey, Huey" rises from the crowd.

The music is amiable, too - but amiable to the point of tedium. I Love Livin' In The City is a ludicrous but fun chimera that welds an AC/DC chorus onto a monstrous funk riff and Huey plays an actual solo as if he's playing air guitar. The rest of the set is more muted, but almost every song has a similarly overwrought solo of the kind that should have been buried by the side of a wide-open freeway in the mid-70s.

Barely digested bits of ersatz jazz-funk, disco, FM rock and Huey's rapping - better than, say, 50 Cent - simmer blandly, blended and presented with dogged competence. The sound verges on Muzak, an indeterminacy not helped by Huey's tendency to mumble. Perhaps it's a Marlon Brando in The Godfather thing. After a while, you realise there aren't any real tunes either, and several of the songs seem to stop randomly rather than actually end.

Suddenly though, Huey's getting serious. "We roast upon the fire of aggressive imperial desire," he notes sombrely in Will I Be Ready, stuffing an awful lot of syllables into his mouth with Brando's cotton wool. Then he's heading down a "road that's strewn with ashes" - which is perhaps fair enough, but also, with a macabre touch, "burnt child's eyelashes." That's not something you want to find in your pasta, or paella, or whatever it is that mama makes.

· At the Forum, London, tomorrow, and touring.