A version of this review appeared in The Age, June 10, 2010.
The original A-Team TV series was a shaggy, silly slice of post-Vietnam 1980s mythology, following the adventures of four veterans falsely accused of war crimes and surviving as “soldiers of fortune”.
Joe Carnahan's remake brings the material bang up-to-date. After a prologue set on the Mexican border, the story proper begins in present-day Iraq, where the team find themselves at odds with representatives of the CIA and a thinly-disguised Blackwater. But there's nothing political about the formulaic plot, which gets going once they embark on a mission to retrieve a briefcase of stolen “plates” that allow the printing of counterfeit money.
Inevitably it all falls apart, leading to arrest, jailbreak, life on the run, the revelation of a secret villain, an assault on a skyscraper and then a brief pause for romance before we're onto the climax where a mandated number of things explode. No doubt it takes as much knowhow to pull off this kind of action movie as it does to craft an intimate drama about an extra-marital affair, but it's an achievement that has little to do with art – even less so here than in Sylvain White's more colourfully outlandish The Losers.
Nor does the casting inspire much excitement. In fairness, Liam Neeson is less dour than usual as the cigar-chomping Colonel “Hannibal” Smith, emulating Harrison Ford's gruff humour with a touch of George C. Scott. Bradley Cooper plays “Face,” the glib ladies' man of the team: no surprises there. As the helicopter pilot “Howling Mad” Murdock, Sharlto Copley from District 9 is all funny accents and voices, as if auditioning for one of the Shrek sequels.
And to answer the only question that anyone cares about, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson is just fine as B.A. Baracus, the badass icon played so memorably in the '80s by Mr T. Carnahan and his fellow writers have worked in numerous variations on B.A.'s catchphrase “I pity the fool”. More surprisingly he's also the most sensitive member of the team, to the point where halfway through he adopts a Gandhi-inspired philosophy of non-violence.
Will he come to his senses at the last moment? Take a guess.
We are all in mourning at our house. You CANNOT have an A-Team movie without Mr T.
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