There’s not really a lot you can say about The A-Team. It’s one of those movies that comes along every summer, where it looks like a lot of time, effort and money has gone into creating something deliberately okay but not great. It seems calculated to appeal to the widest audience possible, never doing anything to absolutely thrill them, but never offering anything that’s likely to turn them off either.
Perhaps unsurprisingly these type of films are often the one’s based on TV shows, old movies or other things, where from the very beginning people have been saying, ‘what’s the point in remaking that?’ And while sometimes they manage to overcome with, more often than not you end up with a movie like The A-Team, which has no reason to exist, other than to trade on the name of the 1980s TV show.
The basic idea is still the same, Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Faceman (Bradley Cooper), Murdoch (Sharlto Copley) and B.A. Baracus (Quinton Jackson) are four men convicted on a crime they didn’t commit. In this case, already soldiers of fortune who’ve become an elite combat unit, the quartet are in Iraq trying to recover the plates that have been used to print billions in fake bills. However on the way back, they’re double-crossed, and the plates are stolen. Unfortunately for the A-Team, the army thinks Hannibal and his team are behind this, so they lock them up.
When Hannibal later gets information about where the plates might be, he decides to break out of jail, round the rest of his team up and try and clear their name. Unsurprisingly, this involves a lot of running around, blowing things up, quipping and causing general mayhem. In fact it’s so brash and loud there’s little time for anything else. You don’t really care about these men or what they’re doing, it’s just onto the next situation and the next thing that needs shooting, exploding or fighting.
It is utterly brainless, but then so was the TV show, but it was fun. So if this, in a way where you can pretty much feel your brain dribbling out of your ears, but it goes so far into the ridiculous that you can either submit and just enjoy the silliness, or you’ll just get angry that so much money could be spent on something that contrives from the opening moments to be so dumb.
I would tell you whether Neeson, Cooper, Copley and Jackson are any good as the new A-Team, but to be honest the film spends so little time on their characters it’s difficult to tell. Instead let’s just say they do a decent job of running through the plot at lightning speed, making occasional jokes and generally seeming to have a whale of a time, irrespective of what’s going on on-screen. The only real weak link is Jackson, who was never going to fill Mr. T’s shoes, but you’d have thought it wouldn’t have been too difficult to find someone with a little more charisma, and his acting inexperience shows. Jessica Biel pops up as a military woman who’s also Faceman’s ex-flame, and once more seems shoved into a role that’s based on her looking pretty, and ends up giving the impression she’s a worse actress than she actually is.
The A-Team is an insanely dumb movie, with more holes than a sieve, but it certainly runs along at quite a clip, includes plenty of references to the original TV show for fans, and offers just enough fun, as long as you don’t mind the fact you won’t have to engage your brain for a second. In fact just take a look at the trailer, as the wham bam style, constant rapid-cut visuals (to be honest, the editor on this film is probably in a hospital somewhere now, suffering from exhaustion) and general dumb inanity are what The A-Team offers for nearly two hours – nothing more, nothing less. If that sounds like your kind of film, you’ll have a blast, if not, you’ll just end up once more decrying the state of Hollywood filmmaking.
Overall Verdict: Instead of finding a reason to exist in its own right, The A-Team just tries for dumb, quick-cut fun. It delivers that, but little more.
Reviewer: Phil Caine
