The A-Team - Review

The A-Team always looked like being a hammy, cheesy affair, it is a pity that the film-makers decided to try to add credibility to this endeavour by casting well-known and respected actors, some of whom rise above the material, some are smothered by it. They would have been better served to have gone all the way and made it a cheese-fest, in short cast Richard Gere and Hannibal. Though I will say this for the film, it is fun.

So many of the current crop of blockbusters are moving toward darker tones with the success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and the over-whelming success of his latest release, Inception, is only likely to increase this trend, however it is good to have some escapist silliness to alleviate the complexity and stodginess of some modern box office draws.

The general plot is well known, a crack team in the US military, are imprisoned for a crime they didn’t commit, and must clear their name by breaking out of jail and finding those that framed them, modernised to include a private security group termed "Black Forest" and while this has the benifit of reminding us of the real private security group operating in Iraq "Black Water", however it does present the problem that the audience are also reminded of a rich desert whenever they appear. Stepping in to the roles for this modern re-imagining are Liam Neeson as Colonel Hannibal Smith, Bradley Cooper as Lt. ‘Faceman’ Pack, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson as B.A. Baracus and Sharlto Copley as Captain H.M. Murdock, supported by Jessica Biel and Patrick Wilson.

The only problem with this unrelenting daftness is that the plot pains you, it is calculated with great precision to draw in the audience in the most clumsy way possible, so the central thrust of the story takes place in Baghdad in the last days of the war, which the audience recognise as newsworthy, this central thrust is over the means to create untraceable US Dollars, which in a recession makes it even more prevalent to the viewer, and then one of the antagonists is a shady Arab, so the audience think ‘that’s bad’ and then he conducts dealings in a German bank, so the audience think ‘that’s doubly bad’.

This poor script work also leads to some truly painful dialogue, in one scene a US Army officer remarks to Hannibal “your Alpha Division or ‘A-Team’...” is a perfect example of the unrealistic dialogue which plagues this film, even worse are the scenes set in Mexico where the characters pepper their dialogue with the word “gringo” due to it being the only word an audience who didn’t come to the cinema to read can recognise, it is only surprising their weren’t more references to cojones, these characters also mix liberally between Spanish and English as an Officer orders his men to “fire” instead of yelling “fuego!”

The film also has pacing issues as the story merely throws up more and more set-pieces, so there is very little opportunity for character development and little conflict among the main cast, which would have added new layers of interest. The film-makers are also confused between which of the characters they want to focus on, they know that the audience is more interested in the iconic character of Bosco B.A. Baracus, but that they are also more interested in Bradley Cooper as the main box office draw, leading to the plot not serving either of these characters in an interesting way.

Patrick Wilson plays one of the chief antagonists, and clearly enjoys one of his few forays into mainstream cinema as he plays his character with obvious pleasure. Sharlto Copley similarly does good work with the little opportunity the film presented him with, the character is chiefly used as a comic device, but Copley provides in droves, making the film twice as enjoyable as it would have been without him. The rest of the cast are treading water, which due to the poor script is more akin to treading custard.

There is also a problem with the Computer Generated (CG) elements of the film, while it is no doubt cheaper and easier to create massive explosions and set-pieces in a computer, rather than the special effects used in the past; as such it leaves them feeling flat and takes away from the dramatic and impressive nature of some of these scenes.

The characters are very thinly drawn and one dimensional, which they even almost comment upon at one point as Liam Neeson’s ‘Hannibal’ calls some of the other characters like “cartoons” which seems like a very introspective and self aware moment, as the film is populated with these cartoonish characters.

The film’s lack of realism and general absurdity make it entertaining, but they mean the film lacks any real threat and as such the audience feels there is no jeopardy and consequently do not engage fully, which is just as well, because there is not much to engage with.