THE A-TEAM
Joe Carnahan
Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom, Skip Woods (TV Series: Frank Lupo, Stephen J. Cannell)
117 min.
Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Wilson, Gerald McRaney, Henry Czerny, Yul Vazquez, Brian Bloom
PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence throughout, language and smoking.
Is anyone really surprised these days when an adaptation of a small screen hit from a bygone era makes it to the big screen and it’s little more than an origin story. It’s not a continuance or a sequel, it’s literally “back to the drawing board”. That’s what The A-Team is. And that’s the film’s biggest problem.
And here we are. Sitting down to a movie that’s based on an action television series that made Mr. T a household name and gave George Peppard a resurgence in popularity. Yet Dwight Schultz and Dirk Benedict didn’t quite see the meteoric rise as many expected. Matter of fact, Schultz has more recognition as Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation than he does as Murdock. Now we have Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper, two exceedingly well known faces in films playing Hannibal and Faceman respectively. Joining them are Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in Mr. T’s role as B.A. Baracus, a relative unknown, and Sharlto Copley who may be recognizable, but most may not remember from where (It’s District 9 if you didn’t know). Copley takes over for Schultz.
The plot for this take on the franchise is that these Marines, united over a clandestine adventure in Mexico against a drug kingpin, become an unstoppable military force in Iraq and are paid back with one last mission to retrieve several $100 printing plates that went missing early in the Desert Storm. And, in good big screen fashion, they are double crossed and sent to prison separately vowing to seek revenge against those who betrayed them and one day get the re-stolen mint plates back. There’s plotting and scheming tracked across three double-crosses or “plans” in the film, which are all cross-cut, inter-cut and mis-cut within their own episodic segments. And at two hours, the film feels more like three by the time everything is over and all you have to show is a acrobatically twisted mind that you have to slowly unravel and a hole in your pocket where a movie ticket for something better could have been.
Neeson can be a terrific actor, but here, he’s one of the worst elements. Forced to growl through his whole performance, you’re left with the unnecessary impression that it’s all Peppard did in the original and I simply don’t recall that being the case. Cooper does little but mug for the camera, show off his well-developed torso and make smarmy winks at anyone and everyone. Jackson attempts vainly to capture the essence of Mr. T and mostly just looks foolish for trying. But Copley seems to be acting in another film altogether, a better one. His range and capability is evident in District 9 from beginning to end, but it’s a wholly other performance there than here and it’s perhaps the only one in the entire film that doesn’t feel unnecessarily exaggerated.
And that’s the screenplay’s biggest weakness, and really is a standard flaw in all of these TV-to-screen adaptations. We look back at the past and remember fondly most of these programs, yet when they finally make it to the big screen, 10 or more years later, you wonder if it is just your memory that was faulty or if it’s the minds of the producers that are. Yet, it’s really a flaw of both. Your own mind expects everything to live up to expectations because it was happy once. Yet, you were younger then and things have a way of changing as your experiences develop. You see more movies. You see more television programs. You have more life events. It all changes your perception of the world around you. When you sent back down to watch something based on those past experiences, your new ones color your impressions and tell you what’s being presented is not the same and you end up disappointed.
But that’s also the artificial expectation set up by money-starved studios hoping you’ll falsely remember the past and bring new joy to their pocketbooks by picking up their vain attempts to revisit past successes. So, they over-exaggerate many of the elements that made the originals popular without realizing that in 10 or 20 years, the medium itself changes. What’s popular on television or the silver screen now would have been excessive or exploitative then. So, to compensate, they take all that was great then and take what’s popular now (which isn’t necessarily great today) and blend the two hoping for a new zeitgeist. Sometimes it’s works. Aside from the annoying Scrappy-Doo, most of the adaptation of Scooby-Doo works. The same could be said for Josie and the Pussycats (and underrated film to be sure) and especially The Addams Family. But more often than not, the end result is an abject failure, even if a monetarily successful one: The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillies, G.I. Joe, Speed Racer and so forth.
Studios love to insert pop culture catch phrases into these productions hoping to further embellish their suggestion that the film will be just as good as the original, but too often they are so excessively unnecessary that they are merely distracting, causing the audience to wonder when the next reference is going to pop up. There are even two attached at the end of the credits.
They have even tried to insert some potential recurring characters (new series regulars?) so they can attract a female audience (Cooper works, but add in a strong female character and you have more collateral) that may not have been too gung ho about The A-Team to start. Jessica Biel feels hopelessly out of place here. Her character isn’t supposed to be too bitch-on-wheels or risk turning off that desired extra demographic the studios want, so they almost make her too much of a cream puff. This is a military officer we’re talking about, not a woman serving in the military. By making them frequently exasperated or heaving breathlessly, you’re suggesting that women can’t be tough.
The other new characters are just about as exaggerated and unnecessary as the main cast. Patrick Wilson is a bit too superficial as the friendly-but-not-so-friendly CIA agent and Brian Bloom is far too maniacal as the obvious bad guy. The producers need to put down their crayon boxes, stop writing numbers into the sectioned line drawings they put on their screenplays and start creating credible and deep villains. These are the guys your audience loves to hate, make them dimensional and they become iconic. Think The Joker.
But by this point, no one should be surprised when a film fails to live up to expectations. Sadly, the past is the past and we cannot relive our childhood or young adolescent lives through the modern big screen. Things have just changed so much. And instead of attempting to recapture that success, perhaps studios should try creating something other than another small-to-big screen clone like what they’ve created in The A-Team.
June 18, 2010
The A-Team
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