THE A-TEAM review: it’s like I’m really in the 80s!

THE A-TEAM review: it’s like I’m really in the 80s!

Jun 11

The A-Team is a movie about blokes killing other blokes. It’s got explosions, macho posturing, silly antagonists and only one token female character. It’s based on the 80s TV show of the same name, and it mixes such established actors as Liam Neeson and, er, Jessica Biel, with relative newcomers like Sharlto Copley (District 9) and “Rampage” Jackson, a big, intimidating wrestler-type. It walks a narrow line between comedy and silliness, character and caricature, action and noise, and miraculously manages to pull off the tricky balance on every count — just.

The first act of The A-Team is easily the best. It’s jam-packed with genuine humour, solid character establishment, and some particularly stunty action. The A-Team wastes no time in drawing to your attention its focus on character: four short character-intro vignettes quickly and sharply define the characters, bring them together for the first time, and unleash them on some fun and unpredictable action set-pieces. After the bombastic opening, though, the film shifts gear, and this is where the cracks start to show.

Hannibal, Murdock, Face and BA (collectively the A-Team) walk a tricky line between Schwarzenegger-esque stunty physicality and Bourne-ish globetrotting espionage. Expanding the key roster of characters from one to four helps the film retain an interesting texture, but robs it of some heart: with so many characters going on so many short, shallow arcs, it’s hard to become really invested in any of them.

But then when there’s parachuting tanks, stereotypically jaded-but-still-in-love ex-girlfriends, and some jerkish CIA types involved, you know the bulk of the audience’s focus is going to be on the action rather than the characters. Here The A-Team is something of a mixed bag. Some action scenes are shot too tight, too dark, and cut too loose to make any coherent sense, while others are thrilling in their physicality and choreography; a more consistent and measured style would have gone a long way.

What doesn’t sit so well is Jessica Biel’s erstwhile antagonist character, apparently the only woman in the entire US Army. Her past, off-screen relationship with polyamourous Face feels more like a convenient last-minute-kiss set-up rather than an organic and realistic relationship — but then again, you’d probably assume that going into a movie like The A-Team.

Just like the 80s actioners of yore, The A-Team‘s villain is typically dull and somewhat predictable. There are some very minor spoilers involved here (as there are technically three bad-guys, and you don’t find out who they all are till about half-way through), so I’ll just say that the puppetmaster behind the A-Team’s predicament is performed with refreshing and amusing gusto, but essentially his character is just a tool, a barrier for the A-Team to violently throw themselves against, with barely a whiff of character to call his own.

I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point out how goddamn funny The A-Team is. I hadn’t expected to find myself laughing out loud, but I actually did it — several times, in fact, and found myself frequently missing lines because I was laughing over them. The last time that happened to me in a cinema was during Tropic Thunder. While the humour in The A-Team mostly fizzles out after the first turning point in the script, it still lends the movie a real sense of fun, and brings a sense of camaraderie to the characters.

The only big bugbear I have with the film is that it assumes I’m a moron. The “laying out the plan” scenes are intercut with the “executing the plan” scenes, which robs those scenes of some of their tension. The film also replays snippets of earlier scenes during pertinent “oh god I just realised this” moments. This is okay when the film calls back to its opening minutes, but at least one of these flashbacks flashed back to a scene not yet five minutes olds; I appreciate the reminder, I’m not that stupid.

Other than that, the film is consistently solid. The cinematography is oddly idiosyncratic for such a paint-by-numbers action flick, and though much of the film is graded an ugly shade of brown it still manages to squeeze in a varied and interesting palette. The music is perfectly serviceable, at once recalling and redifining the iconic “dun duh-dun duuuuun” of the original TV, and like so many Hollywood movies, it’s hard to fault it technically, either.

The acting is mixed, but skewing towards positive. Liam Neeson, Sharlto Copley and Bradley Cooper nail their respective characters; Jessica Biel manages not to embarrass herself in the only female character of note in the film; and only Quentin “Rampage” Jackson lets the team down, favouring line-readings over more in-the-moment performance, but, when you’re comparing the guy to Mr T, it’s hard to begrudge the mediocrity of his performance.

Having never really watched an episode of The A-Team, I didn’t really know what I was walking into when I sat down to watch this movie adaptation. Fortunately, the film managed to nail the crucial opening hook, and from that point on, I was sucked into it. I can forgive the script’s and actors’ shortcomings, and I can forgive some poorly-shot action scenes, because on balance the movie is just too much fun to deny.

To paraphrase Hannibal and erstwhile protege Face, I love it when a plan comes together; while The A-Team doesn’t quite nail all aspects of the blueprint, it gets enough of the plan right to feel like it’s “come together,” and what more can you ask of a formulaic 80s style actioner such as this?

The A-Team