Early on in Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team, Hannibal Smith outlines a complex heist plan in front of his team, using little figurines on a board game-like map. Intercut with this, we have second-long clips of the plan in action; brief spurts that, we assume, are visual cues of how everything should go.
Then, as Hannibal wraps up his outline, we cut to an extended climax of the heist and how everything works out according to plan. It’s a nice setup. I then waited patiently for the actual heist scene to unfold. Only it never comes.
No, the ADD-inflected A-Team delivers intercuts the setup and payoff for almost all its big action sequences at the exactly same time, resulting in a jumbled mess that delivers neither suspense nor thrills nor, despite all the explosions and crashes and gunplay, any action at all. The film only suggests action.
It’s cut together like a trailer. There’s nothing going on here except the pretense of something going on.
I complain about the frenetic cinematography and editing of most contemporary action scenes, and Carnahan takes that one step further: to throw us off even more, he cuts in flashbacks and flash-forwards and quippy one-liners and bad-guy reaction shots and everything else that could be just fine surrounding the action, but has absolutely no place during the action.
The A-Team shows us a punch about to be thrown, and then cuts to five unrelated shots before it connects, if it connects at all. It’s a perfectly incomprehensible clusterfuck that approaches surrealism in its ineptitude. This can be forgiven, maybe, if the movie embraces its lunacy and gives us something truly different.
Truth be told, I had fun with the over-the-top A-Team for about an hour: the ridiculous stunt work (helicopters doing barrel rolls, a tank flying through the air using the gun as propulsion), the machismo swagger, Murdock’s one-liners.
Past the hour mark, however, the movie loses all charm as it devolves into more standard action fare, and becomes positively tortuous to sit through.
The A-Team is, of course, based on the mid-80s TV show created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo, which starred George Peppard and Mr. T as part of a rogue do-good commando squad made up of four unjustly disgraced Vietnam vets. I never really watched the show, but caught enough of it to feel the goofy charm that resulted in its success, which the movie only gets half-right.
In the movie, Liam Neeson takes over for Peppard as the leader of the team, Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith. Bradley Cooper (The Hangover) is Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck. UFC star Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson fills in for Mr. T as B.A. Baracus, and District 9‘s Sharlto Copley is ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock.
The setting is upgraded to Iraq: after a successful mission in which the team retrieves counterfeit USD and printing plates for Capt Charisa Sosa (Jessica Biel) and CIA ghost Lynch (Patrick Wilson), they’re double-crossed by a team of mercenaries lead by Pike (co-writer Brian Bloom), blamed for the fallout, dishonorably discharged and sent to separate prisons. Now they have to clear their name(s), which involves breaking out of military prison, getting the team back together, and tracking down Pike.
The measures are ridiculous – the highlight, the aforementioned flying tank scene – but the direction so inept that we cannot follow the action, or derive any pleasure from the preposterousness.
What we understand from the tank scene is not from what we see, but what is explained to us in a string of dialogue that continues throughout the scene. The (unimpressive) CGI, the stunt work, and the explosions are all perfunctory; we’d understand it just as well with our eyes closed.
By the hour mark, the plot of The A-Team seems to have resolved itself. It continues anyway, stumbling over a single plot point for another 45 minutes and delivering an explosion-filled climax that is a complete disaster.
Neeson and Bradley are just OK as the more-or-less straight-faced members of the team. Jackson seems fine, but the Baracus character is a real mess: continually whining about his fear of flying, getting his ass kicked, and delivering precious little ass kicking himself.
But Copley absolutely steals the show as Murdock: the one-liners whispered under his breath resonate louder than all of the faux-action and macho swagger in the film. Wilson and Bloom are also good, providing some humor; they contribute one of the film’s best scenes, an otherwise inconspicuous car ride.
By the midpoint I was half-enjoying movie; by the end I hated it. If you can forgive the film its faults (a tall order, considering this action movie completely botches the action scenes and becomes a real snooze), you’ll have a good time here.
But as much as I enjoyed (or tolerated, rather) some of the individual aspects, I just can’t forgive those faults. The A-Team is the machismo-pandering equivalent of Sex and the City 2.
