The A-Team

Look, no one should really have high expectations of a film based on The A-Team... I think the bar has been set so low on action films and TV-to-film reboots that a movie like The A-Team really doesn't have to do much to come out on top. Just get some colourful actors, chuck in some jokes, and point the camera at the action so we can see all the cool stuff as it explodes. So with this criteria in mind, The A-Team is like the Oscar-winning Best Film of shitty action movies. It's actually a really fun and satisfying movie without straying too far from what you would expect from it.

Liam Neeson rides high on his recent career transformation into a silver screen hard man (Taken, Unknown) as Hannibal, the team's hardened leader and brains. He's joined by Bradley Cooper as Face (the smartarsed prettyboy), Sharlto Copley as Murdock (the crazy one) and Quinton Jackson as B. A. Barracus (the Mr. T one). Loosely following the format of the TV show, the 'A-Team' are a small crew of former U.S. rangers forced to turn rogue when they're set up and betrayed by a shifty CIA agent named Lynch (Patrick Wilson).

It's the usual 21st action film story where honest down-to-earth, wisecracking American soldiers find themselves pitted against evil and treacherous pen-pushing CIA types (see Related Texts). This is set up quite early in the film when one of the 'good' characters makes a quip about Patrick Wilson's CIA-styled black ops guy usually "Installing a dictator or overthrowing a democracy" somewhere. The other major subtext that's quite easy to pick up is the film's weird pro-violence message in regards to the character of B. A. Barracus... it's a message that might be offensive in a lot of other films, but as this movie is so far off the planet in terms of realism it almost seems like a good-natured joke. The A-Team is larger than life, it doesn't even pretend to be attached to reality - the laws and rules of this film all pertain to a 'genre reality' that's endemic to action films. Hannibal even ironically refers to one of the bad guys as "a thug, a cartoon character".

Joe Carnahan and his editor keep all their plates spinning from start to finish, the film never sits still long enough to get boring or monotonous. It manages to keep its pace up for the full duration, which shouldn't be sneezed at (most action films try the same thing and fail). Carnahan employs a film trailer-styled approach to editing that makes information very easy to assimilate for modern audiences with short attention spans... I don't think this is neccessarily a bad thing either, it's a good way to go about pacing and structuring an action film if you're savvy enough to pull it off. I also loved how the big and ingenious action set pieces were all designed around the main characters working as a team (such as the scene where one of them launches a rocket into a skyscraper just before another abseils down into the hole it makes). Some people will inevitably dislike this movie for being exactly what it aims to be - big, brassy and not too serious, but if you enjoy action movies then you should definitely check this one out.

DIRECTOR: Joe Carnahan
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom and Skip Woods, based on the television series created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo.
KEY ACTORS: Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Jessica Biel, Brian Bloom, John Hamm

RELATED TEXTS:
- The mid-1980s television series The A-Team, which ran for five years.
- The recent comic-to-film adaptation The Losers is almost beat-for-beat the exact same movie as The A-Team, only not as fun or enthusiastically-acted.
- The trope of the 'honest' team of practical but specially-trained soldiers going up against dodgy CIA types who want to betray America seems to have seeped into action films a lot in the last couple of years... examples include The Losers, Red and The Expendables. It seems to have risen partially due to a shift of emphasis from lone action heroes (such as your typical Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis films from the 1990s) to team efforts, perhaps reflecting the positive attention given by the American media to their own rescue services and armed forces in the post-9/11 era.
- Joe Carnahan previously directed the films Smokin' Aces and Narc.