More Expendable Losers
It’s no surprise that The A-Team is a bad movie. What is surprising is that it could have been great.
Really.
Look, I spent a good portion of my weekend in child care classes with my wife and about ten other couples; though not the rule, a handful of the men were the sorriest, most clueless, guffawing assholes you’d ever hope to meet. At one point, one guy said (insert stereotypical Midwest working-class accent here), “Hey, I don’t know nuttin’ ‘bout kids an’ babies an’ what dey need. I ain’t even ever held a baby, y’know?”
Fact: I caught this same clown studying the grime under his fingernails during the “How Husbands Can Help During Breastfeeding” lesson.
Note: I have nothing against the working class. I appreciate the skills and hard work they put in to make my life easier. But I can’t abide living, breathing cartoons of any stripe, and that goes for the rich, too.
What the hell does this have to do with Joe Carnahan’s big-screen re-imagining of a campy 80s TV classic?
Everything, because my unfortunate classmate is the exact Alpha Male freak show that The A-Team is all about—at least in this incarnation.
There’s so much wrong with this movie that has nothing to do with the guts of the story, and everything to do with the studio’s need to dumb down the dialogue, action, and point of the film. I was appalled (yes, actually appalled) by some of the scenes in this picture, but the worst part is that I didn’t leave the theatre angry, just tired and heavy with defeat.
The movie’s biggest problem is that it opens with the origin of the team, but there’s no indication going in that this is the case. We find Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson) getting into trouble while chasing down a corrupt Mexican general; this means that he’s not on hand to rescue his partner, Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Bradley Cooper) when he gets caught sleeping with the general’s wife (and stealing secrets or something).
Fortunately for both men, B.A. Baracus (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson) also happens to be in Mexico, picking up his custom van from a garage run by what appear to be Detroit thugs. They say something or do something that offends B.A., and he beats the hell out of everyone in the room. Honestly, I was paying attention during the whole scene, and the only part I understood was B.A. driving off in the van at the end of it.
B.A. runs into Hannibal on the road, and Hannibal commandeers the van. It’s at this point that I realized this was a macho meet-cute, and my confusion kicked into high gear. You see, on the television show, the members of The A-Team all fought together in Viet Nam and were wrongfully accused of committing a crime—which led to them breaking out of prison and following in the fine tradition of using their crazy skills to help random people, as established by The Incredible Hulk.
Here, they’re a random group of Army Rangers, and after the Mexicans are (mostly) dealt with, the three badasses break the clinically insane Murdock (Sharlto Copley) out of an American military hospital (which is in the same neighborhood, in Mexico). Murdock is an ace helicopter pilot, you see, and he leads the not-yet-dead evil general on a daring chase—The A-Team are assaulted with bullets and missiles, but that nutty Murdock spins the helicopter with all the ease of…well, a CG helicopter.
The battle ends when the Good Guys cross into U.S. airspace over Arizona and call in a strike against the Mexicans—who are promptly blown out of the sky by rockets that emerge from nowhere. There’s a big laugh line right before the Bad Guys get killed that was, I guess, supposed to elicit cheers; I was too busy fighting off a wave of Bush-era flashbacks, wherein I was expected to applaud the destruction of random non-Americans whose crimes were never quite made clear.
Next, we get the “8 Years Later” title card, and find the boys in Iraq. They’ve been running covert missions for the military, and have a reputation of getting particularly dirty jobs done discreetly. They’re asked by General Morrison (Gerald McRaney, the one inspired casting choice, due to his having starred in the 80s sitcom Major Dad) to sneak into Baghdad and recover a bunch of counterfeit currency plates.
After another exhausting “action” sequence, the team returns victorious and are on their way to meet the general—when his jeep is blown up. This leads to a court martial and the four guys are sent to different prisons in different countries.
We then get another title card, “6 Months Later”, and I lost my fucking patience. It’s a really bad sign when a movie takes forty minutes (plus the ten it takes The A-Team to bust out of jail and regroup) before getting around to moving the plot forward. The plot, it turns out is the same revenge story that we saw in The Losers, with our rag-tag band of good-hearted outlaws trying to clear their name while bringing down a rogue CIA operative (this time played by Patrick Wilson).
I won’t bore you with the rest of the mechanics, except to say that there’s a SHAMELESS rip-off of The Dark Knight’s Tokyo skyscraper scene, and a climax at the Port of Los Angeles that reminded me of The Usual Suspects—in every way except for the quality and class of the execution. The movie ends with The A-Team once again taking the fall for the government and being hauled off to prison—only this time, it’s alluded to that they’ll make their escape and live on the lam. So I walked out of the theatre having just watched a prequel to an actual A-Team movie.
As I said earlier, the film could have been great. Sharlto Copley is wonderful as Murdock, and I loved the way he used his insanity to drop his fake Southern accent in favor of his South African one on a whim (he’s the only member of the team to really make an impression—but I’ll give the cast the benefit of the doubt and blame the writing). Also, the conflicting jurisdictions and secret projects of the Defense Department, the CIA and shady mercenary organization Black Forest (a stand-in for real-life contractors Blackwater) was very cool. In fact, there are whole stretches where The A-Team wasn’t on screen that I half-way engaged the story, and lamented the fact that this movie was not written for adults.
I wonder, what’s the expiration date on this two-decades-old brand of lousy summer blockbuster? At what point will the “Turn Off Your Brain and Enjoy the Movie” crowd realize they’ve seen all of this stuff before, and done far better? Even a toddler grows out of watching the same episode of Yo Gabba Gabba! eventually; but these expensive, insulting explosion fests rake in record amounts of cash, year after year.
And if you’re thinking I probably expected too much out of an A-Team movie, let me take you back to the 2008 blockbuster, The Dark Knight. Granted, I didn’t like that film. But I’ll acknowledge the filmmakers’ desire to pump some intelligence into the summer season, with an intricate plot that didn’t rely on constant voice-over flashbacks to scenes that happened three minutes before, for the purpose of making sure absolutely everyone in the audience was caught up. It also took risks, thematically, and painted the “good guys” and “bad guys” with finer brushes than might be expected in a “dumb comic book movie.”
I don’t expect every action movie to be serious, but they should at least be fun. I can’t have fun watching something designed to entertain the biggest meathead in the theatre—and then me.