The A-Team
With big-budget summer fare, I think often people look to reviewers for permission more than anything else. Sometimes, with movies everyone’s talking about like Avatar, we want permission not to go. We want someone to confirm our suspicion that the movie is awful so we feel better about not seeing it. Or, in the case of a movie like The A-Team, we want someone to give us permission to go, remove the guilt from the guilty-pleasure and say “hey, it’s pretty good. Don’t feel bad about wanting to go see it!”
Allow me to be your enabler. Hey, it’s pretty good! Don’t feel bad about wanting to see it!
This is how you resurrect a beloved property. You play it completely straight, and just make a bad-ass film. Anyone who remembers the original series with fondness (warning: do not attempt to enhance that fondness by going back and watching the original!) will love this, and anyone who’s never heard of or seen the original will have a great time. It’s exactly what I wanted from The Losers, but only got glimpses of, here and there.
Somewhat bravely, the movie does not take our heroes’ backstory and shove the whole thing offscreen, open with a jailbreak. Nor does the Set Up, the mechanism by which the team ends up in jail, or breaks out, happen in the first ten minutes. Oh no. First we get an over-the-top action sequence whereby our heroes meet and Hannibal gets the team together. Then we fast forward several years, to Iraq and the modern day, and the team are tasked with recovering some stolen plates used for forging US currency. This is the operation wherein the team is set up.
That arc, from getting the team together and recovering the stolen plates, is fully half the movie. This is a movie that takes its time with its characters, lavishes action sequences around, and allows the actors time to show camaraderie.
That’s my favorite thing in all moviedom, camaraderie. So when you put it in front of me, I tend to like it. My problem with The Losers is that we rarely got to see them doing their thing and enjoying it. There’s nothing in The A-Team that’s as much fun, as perfect and beautiful, as the Don’t Stop Believing sequence from The Losers, but in retrospect that’s all The Losers had. Whereas the A-Team has several fantastic action sequences, lots of laughs, some good dialog, sympathetic characters. Pretty much everything you want from a summer action movie.
Alas a movie like this is only as good as its bad-guy and that’s where everything kinda falls apart. The plot, how the story gets from point A to point B after the first half, probably makes sense if I spent a lot of time trying to puzzle it out, but I didn’t then and I’m not going to now. I think a lot of movies, and a lot of video games, give plot short shrift. Yes, you can take for granted that the audience will follow the characters anywhere if you’ve done your work, and so the plot becomes window-dressing. It only needs to *sound* like it makes sense. The audience will tune out, but they’ll think “presumably this would make sense if I paid attention,” and so you, the writer, escape. You’ve tricked your audience into thinking you knew what you were talking about, even if they didn’t. But that’s what separates a movie like Die Hard or Romancing the Stone from awful action movies: incredibly tight plotting. Everyone knows what Hans wanted in Die Hard and how he was going to get it. But it’s not clear to me why there were two or three bad guys in this movie and what they wanted. Or, maybe it is, I’m not sure.
None of the bad guys are memorable. It’s the rare movie that stacks villains two or three deep and keeps them all memorable and compelling. Robocop is probably the best at this. Die Hard has two good bad guys. Lethal Weapon had two, but one was forgettable. If the plot for the second half were a little more straight forward, if there was one fantastic bad guy–and it’s no small challenge to find someone to play the heavy to Neeson’s hero–then we’d be talking about a truly great action movie. But what we get instead is still a surprising amount of fun, and better–I feel–than The Losers which it inspired.
The actors take to their roles well. There’s a little too much work in getting things like “I love it when a plan comes together” to make sense. I’m not sure a statement like that needs an explanation, but at the same time we learn why BA hates to fly, and it’s pretty spectacular. So the principle is sound, they just go overboard a little trying to get the actors to convincingly say lines of dialog designed to explicate character we don’t need explicated.
Liam Neeson is a born leader and has been a friend to genre work ever since Excalibur, Krull, and Darkman. Here, we believe these men would follow him, we believe he’s got everything worked out, and we believe nothing is as crazy as it looks.
It was fun watching Sharlto Copley from District 9 being, if not too crazy, just crazy enough. His accent comes and goes and if you’ve ever wondered what a South African speaking with a Louisiana accent would sound like, it turns out it sounds Australian. I have no explanation for this, its purely observational analysis. His Murdock is slightly more believable than the one we got in the TV show, in that you feel this is a character using the insanity bit as a smokescreen, possibly for some deep disturbance, rather than an actor using it to get a laugh.
I have no idea where Quinton Jackson came from, I haven’t bothered to look him up, because I don’t need to. I have some awareness that he’s from some other entertainment, which means probably wrestling, but who cares? It would only matter if there were a problem, and there’s no problem. There are a few moments where he’s sitting opposite Liam Neeson and you realize he’s out of his league…and you realize he’s realizing it, but mostly he’s acting off the other two members of the team and he’s a lot of fun.
The guy they have as Face is a lot of fun, but doesn’t get much chance to show us why he’s on the team. That’s another thing that’s not a problem; we like him and we like the interplay between the four characters, but Liam Neeson is a pretty charismatic dude, and pretty good looking, so you need some other reason to have Face on the team besides charm and good looks. He needs to be the thief, the cat burglar and while we get one or two moments that hint at that, it would have been nice to see it.
It’d be nice if we could have a sequel to this, but there’s no real need. Plenty of action movies to go around. But it’s an awful lot of fun to watch Liam Neeson having fun in an action movie.
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June 11th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
South African accents really seem to baffle us North American types, for example the South African actor from the Mass Effect 2 DLC (YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF MASS EFFECT 2) sounds like a cross between cockney and eastern European.
June 12th, 2010 at 12:37 am
There was a South African dude in ME2? I didn’t realize that!
The Afrikaner accent is weird for us Americans, but nothing like as weird as when it’s filtered through the lens of an South African actor trying to sound like he’s from Kentucky. THEN it sounds really weird. There’s one moment where he’s posing as a SA journo and he gets to do his real accent, but it’s in the background and you have to know it’s happening to recognize it.
June 12th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
He’s the main bad guy in the Kasumi expansion. (It’s a so-so mission, and anti-climactic if you’ve already beaten the game, but if you think you’re ever going to do another playthrough you might like having a new character to play with.)
June 28th, 2010 at 7:05 am
Quinton “Rampage” Jackson is a MMA fighter meaning that he’s a real (non-choreographed) striking/submission grappling combatant. He fights in the UFC and has held the light-heavyweight belt (although no longer). In short, he’s a for-real bad-ass who, yes, is out of his league with Neeson. On the other hand, he has some of rap-star charisma they were allegedly looking for in the role and didn’t drop the ball.
I was happy to see him pull it off.
-Marco