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A-Team – Review
The tagline to the 2010 version of the A-Team is that There Is No Plan B. Unfortunately, there seems to have been no Plan A, either.
Watching director/writer Joe Carnahan’s latest action opus you half wonder if he really thought that having characters with absolutely no backstory, no lives to speak of prior to what we see when we hit the ground literally running on the opening fifteen minutes of the film was an especially good idea. Certainly having a Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson fill in the shoes left by the charismatic Mr. T in the 80’s might have seemed good in theory but, in execution, it was a miserable decision. Jackson tosses out T’s wildly popular refrain “Fool” as if he were a drunken slob performing it in front of the venerable TV action star in jest. Jackson seems to be well enough equipped to perform as his own if he weren’t trying to inhabit the body of a character decades old but it does feel old. This movie feels old.
What Carnahan’s camera work, accurately depicting what it would look like if you were to strap a movie camera on a paint shaker and left to run, disappointingly fails to accomplish is a sense of visceral action, of fun. In Smokin’ Aces, Carnahan’s last directorial outing, the camera was in love with what it was capturing; be it Jeremy Piven’s descent into madness, the Tremor brother’s equally impassioned decent into madness, or the action that punctuating the moments where mayhem was the name of the game, that film should have set Carnahan up here to make something with an even bigger budget to blow things up. What we get, however, is humor that doesn’t cut as deep as Aces and action set pieces that simply feel perfunctory than they do a visceral part of what we all want. What we all want the whole time, mind you, is one that captures Carnahan’s talents but when the movie takes no time to give these four men, Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Face (Bradley Cooper), B.A. Baracus, and Murdock (Sharlto Copley) any sense of camaraderie or kinship these men are all expendable.
The story itself is painfully simplistic: while performing the kinds of things that the A-Team is known for doing in Iraq, while we don’t know what these things are we do see some of our members strategically battle scarred (Cooper, who has a lot of screen time without his shirt on) for proper effect, they’re offered a job. The job has them retrieving American currency printing plates from the dirty clutches of Iraqis who are up to no good. With shocking ease and movie magic that elevates what these men pull off to heights that even the most forgiving person with a good suspension of disbelief would think is insane, the men do the impossible, literally, and are framed once the job goes south. The men, wanting to clear their good name, are freed by a little nudging of CIA agent Lynch (Patrick Wilson, who plays his part with as much listless gusto as Edward Norton did in the Italian Job) go on the hunt for the plates in a story that presents no speed bumps or obstacles too realistic that these men can’t overcome.
The fault, primarily, lies at the feet of Carnahan, Brian Bloom, and Skip Woods. The former, Carnahan, has no excuse. Both Narc and Smokin’ Aces still hold up as examples for how great and pulpy screenwriting can be and the writing here just reeks of someone who has no interest in logic or depth. Bloom, on the other hand, has an excuse. This is his foray into credited screenwriting after over a 25 year career in Hollywood and if his character in the film (Pike) was any indication of the kind of material he’s capable of producing it’s a sad indication of how one-dimensional he decided to present. However, writer Skip Woods has written such action films as Hitman and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. These two films take the wonder out of trying to decipher why there is no blood coursing through the people we see on the screen, why they feel as alive as a piece of scenery, pawns to be simply moved at the whims of a script that deems it so without any fundamental reasoning.
The wafer thin love subplot between Cooper and Jessica Biel (Charisa Sosa) is a particularly curious addition to the film in that it too feels like it was put there simply to keep it being a premature sequel to The Expendables. A woman and man do not a romance make and the nonexistence of chemistry or, again, deeper history between these two fails to help make this a compelling relationship to care about in any meaningful way. The direction that Gerald McRaney’s (General Morrison) character goes not only feels like lazy scriptwriting but it’s a shameful callback to old Scooby-Doo episodes where the big reveal depends on a literal unmasking. All that was missing in this movie was for these men to all wake up and realize they were just fantasizing the idea that they were all a super team impervious to logic or reality.
This was a movie that is supposed to be fun to watch because we want to see these men overcome the danger of being the hunted while also being on the hunt. The failure to capture the sense these men were in any real danger of either being taken back into custody or being killed on assignment almost makes you wonder whether if this ought to have been shown on NBC as a movie of the week if this was how toothless the movie was going to play out on the screen.
When one of the best compliments you get from a critic who actually gave a positive review of your film remarks about the good-lookingness of your lead actor as a reason why people will like your movie, there’s something wrong with it. We ought to embrace the mayhem and excitement of men like this on the loose, fighting two sides of the law, and we ought to have been given a movie that took an OK television show to explosive heights. Instead, we have a pack of actors just wandering in a movie where you simply don’t care what happens to them. We just want them off our screen so we can go home.
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