Band of Brothers offer clean family fun

For the most part, the experience is missing from Disney's Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience. Possibly because the 3-D glasses can only be whipped out at a lone UAE screen – Grand Cinemas, Festival City to be exact.

This is, of course, meant to be a 3-D concert film built around the band of brothers so popular with female tweeners. But if you can't make it to Festival City, don't fret, because unlike U2 3D, director Bruce Hendricks makes little use of 3-D technology other than to have a band member occasionally throw something at the camera. A runway thrusts out into the audience for a brother to venture out into a sea of female hands. And that's it.

Not that this will dissuade any of the Jonas Brothers fan club of young females who adore every musical chord and bit of foolishness emanating from the stage.

The concert, taken from the brothers' Burning Up tour last year, was mostly filmed at the Honda Center in Anaheim, Florida despite the film's attempt to make it look like everything is happening in Manhattan. Guess the Big Apple is more hip.

Adding to the pedestrian presentation are "backstage" antics and a single-song Central Park concert that are lame. The main selling points to the band, which originally gained popularity on Disney Channel, are their clean-cut, "family-friendly" image. Certainly their musicianship and onstage professionalism are smooth, though too smooth. There is little spontaneity.

The brothers make good dance music with a strong beat and rhythm. Here, they never attempt a ballad or anything other than uptempo raves and fuzzy guitar licks. The sound amplification and the screams of tweens tend to drown out the lyrics, but what does come through is bubblegum.

At one point, the band is joined onstage by Disney's latest ingenue, 16-year-old Demi Lovato, who has a voice but like the brothers, lacks a presence. Another forgettable appearance is made by 19-year-old country star Taylor Swift. The subtext here is the extreme youth of the film's performers, even though two of the three Jonas Brothers are legally adults – Kevin is 21, Joe 19 and Nick 16.

How about a battle of the bands between the ageing Jonas Brothers and Jack Black's elementary-school kids in 2003's now-classic School of Rock? The Jonases wouldn't stand a chance.