C
When “The Losers” came out a few weeks ago, I called it “The C-Team.” It turns out that the new “A-Team” is a C-team, too. That’s probably just, seeing that it comes from a writer-director named Carnahan.
The movie is, of course, an updating of the old TV show that ran on NBC in the mid-eighties, about a quartet of Army Rangers, wrongly sent to prison, who escaped and became soldiers-for-hire. The script by Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom and Skip Woods, might pass as the pilot for a new series, with the necessary cast changes. Liam Neeson takes the George Peppard part of Col. Hannibal Smith, the gruff, cigar-smoking leader of the pack, and Bradley Cooper replaces Dirk Benedict as “Faceman” Peck, the smooth-talking pretty boy. They’re joined by Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as “B.A.” Baracus, standing in for Mr. T, and Sharlto Copley as “Mad Dog” Murdock, originally played by Dwight Schultz.
The plot has the guys cashiered for a failed operation near the start of the Iraq invasion. At the suggestion of a CIA agent “named” Lynch (Patrick Wilson), they extract a ton of counterfeit American bills and the engraving plates for them from Baghdad. But on their return to base the plates are stolen, and the bills destroyed, by a sleazy contractor named Pike (co-scripter Bloom), and in the melee the commanding general (Gerald McRaney), an old buddy of Smith’s, is killed. The team are all court-martialed and convicted, but with Lynch’s aid they’re sprung to go after Pike, retrieve the plates, prove their innocence and get their rank back. But they’re pursued by an old flame of Peck’s, erstwhile Captain (now Lieutenant) Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel), working on behalf of the DOD.
One trusts that the note of irony was intended by Carnahan when, early on, Smith calls Pike a “cartoon character,” because all the four team members are just that—the hard-as-nails leader, the smiling playboy, the bruiser who’s afraid of flying, the certifiably nutty super-pilot. And the action the script puts them through—as well as the macho humor—is strictly of the comic-book variety. Of course “The A-Team” always was a live-action cartoon, so that’s hardly a problem. And though Carnahan’s staging of the big action sequences is splashy but rather messy, at least it avoids the garish, ugly hyperkinetic look of his dreadful “Smokin’ Aces.”
Where the movie falls down is in the plotting, which is convoluted but, in the final analysis, curiously obvious. The major “reveal” that comes with about a half-hour left is predicated on the unmasking of a mysterious Arab whose identity is supposed to be a surprise; but anybody who doesn’t recognize him the moment that a photograph of the fellow is flashed on the screen needs an eye examination posthaste. (That’s apparently the case with all our “heroes,” none of whom are on to him either.) In addition, to allow for a climax filled with showdowns, the team repeatedly neglects to simply kill Pike although they have plenty of opportunities, leaving him to threaten them again and again.
Among the cast, it’s Copley—who sprang into the profession with the surprise South African hit “District 9”—who makes the biggest impression, making the loony Murdock easily the most enjoyable figure here. Neeson is slumming again—he’s too good an actor for this sort of stuff—and as usual with him, Cooper tries hard to be charming but comes up short. (He really does personify the Peter Principle. A leading man he’s not—or at least shouldn’t be.) In looks, Jackson’s a pretty good facsimile of Mr. T, but he has very little of the older man’s charisma (and none of his gold chains). The supporting cast is frankly boring—Wilson’s even drabber than Cooper, Bloom’s a smirking cipher, and McRaney is just conventionally gruff. Even Biel makes surprisingly little impression, however much the camera might linger on her photogenic figure. But technically the picture’s solid across the board, even with the director’s penchant for fuzzing up the big moments.
In sum, a perfectly average summer action movie. You needn’t pity the fool who goes to see it, but he’s not in for anything special.