Film Review: The A-Team

Here’s another billion-dollar-wannabe that’s pitched too loud and cut too fast – though it’s actually one of the better ones. It has funny moments, including the first-ever joke about 3-D in a Hollywood movie. It has good performances, at least in the sense of actors standing tall and spitting out lines with aplomb. It has top-class action scenes. It’s not a travesty of the much-beloved 80s TV series. It just leaves a heavy aftertaste, like so many of these things – the exact same taste you get from junk-food, the sense of feeling bloated without feeling full. And you also feel slightly used, whether by the aggressive filmmaking or the equally aggressive hype that precedes it – as if someone had clamped your mouth open and forced the food down.

That ‘cut too fast’ niggle is especially jarring. It’s not just the action scenes (which are quite coherent, by Transformers standards), it’s the bits in between. At one point, A-team leader Hannibal (Liam Neeson) is plotting his escape from jail, and having a quiet conversation with CIA agent Lynch. The whole scene lasts barely a minute – yet the film shifts abruptly halfway through, from the prison to the prison yard and back again. It’s all one conversation, just artificially broken up lest it start to seem ‘boring’. No wonder audiences don’t pay attention anymore, when the film itself constantly gives the impression of wanting to be somewhere else.

What do punters want from a big-screen version of The A-Team? Hard to say. I suspect this is one of those shows that’s more beloved than actually remembered. Given its generic plot-lines, most people’s memories probably end at the stirring theme music and clutch of famous catch-phrases – which is fine, because the theme music plays intermittently, and cigar-smoking Hannibal says “I love it when a plan comes together!”. Admittedly, B.A. Baracus (previously played by Mr. T, now by Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson) never actually says “I pity the fool!”, mostly because Mr. T coined that one in Rocky III – but he does have “PITY” and “FOOL” tattooed on his knuckles, so we’ll call that a pass.

Actually, the film is more than passable. Taken in fragments – instead of a two-hour whole – it’s often sensational. The Team abseil down skyscrapers, get in a helicopter dog-fight and cause an entire tanker-load of containers to topple over (a spectacular image). Not only do they commandeer an Army cargo plane but, when the plane gets shot down, they float to earth in a tank (with parachutes attached) which they find in the cargo – and not only do they float down in the tank but they also open the hatch (based on the dubious theory that a person can breathe at 20,000 feet) and use a machine-gun to shoot down other planes! This leads Baracus to freak out, though only because he has a fear of flying. “Technically, we’re not flying,” points out Hannibal. “That’s because we’re falling, fool!” comes the reply.

Mr. Rampage fills Mr. T’s boots quite ably (though he’s not so fierce-looking), Neeson makes a magisterial Hannibal, Bradley Cooper is perfectly nonchalant as the reckless, womanising ‘Face’ and Sharlto Copley from District 9 is suitably insane as Murdock, lapsing into fake British accents and doing a Braveheart impression when he’s not flying planes like … well, a madman. It’s also nice to see the CIA back to being villains in American movies, after that post-9/11 period when they briefly threatened to become sympathetic – they’re still bumbling, but they make no pretence of being patriotic – though the film stumbles with the character of Agent Lynch (Patrick Wilson), trying in vain to flesh him out. The Team’s final plan depends, so we’re told, on using Lynch’s character flaws to destroy him – but Lynch has no character flaws simply because he’s not a character, just a mildly entertaining blockbuster bad-guy.

That’s the real problem with The A-Team – that it’s not content to be brain-dead, like last year’s Transformers sequel, but goes through the motions of being clever, like (say) The Usual Suspects. Our heroes make elaborate plans, use their brains to get out of tight spots – but the film doesn’t convince as a brainy movie (the plans are wildly implausible), because it’s been designed as a mindless summer movie. The script tries for depth, making Baracus take a vow of non-violence – Hannibal later persuades him that violence is sometimes appropriate – but that whole arc feels false in the context of stuff blowing up. Better to talk about the scene where Face asks Hannibal why they need to gather so many props for his latest elaborate scheme – and Hannibal replies with a line that could serve as a motto (or epitaph) for the whole blockbuster genre, not just The A-Team but all these overstuffed, overlong, pitched-too-loud-and-cut-too-fast billion-dollar wannabes: “Because overkill is underrated, my friend!”.