Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/19/10
Stephen J. Cannell was one
of the greatest of a generation of TV writer/producers who created and
then supervised seemingly dozens of shows at once. His work, including
The
Rockford Files, Hardcastle & McCormick and The Greatest
American Hero, stood for something seminally 80's: that you could
live large, fight crime and have loads of fun doing both. The stories
weren't complicated, and neither were the characters, but damn they were
fun, and it's hard to find a guy who grew up during his heyday whose definition
of cool wasn't at least somewhat influence by his work. And in that
sense, The A-Team (co-created by Frank Lupo) was his masterpiece.
The saga of four wrongfully accused Vietnam vets who traveled the country
fleeing the military and helping ordinary folks along the way was built
out of icons: four pedal-down crazy-cool characters, an outrageous
haircut, a super-cool custom van, awesome catchphrases and a hero who moonlit
as the star of a series of horror movies where he played a sea monster
called the Aquamaniac. Like many great TV shows, The A-Team
burned hot for a short period and by the time its fifth season introduced
several new characters and totally reinvented the concept, it looked like
a series challenging the longevity records of Gunsmoke and Law
& Order. But at its peak, it was exactly what gives people
the idea that beloved TV shows would make great movies, and Joe Carnahan
has delivered on that promise. The A-Team is a celebration
of the coolness of teamwork, kicking ass, and having a ball doing what
you do well. It's the epitome of action-packed summer movie fun.
In a whirlwind adventure
south of the border, we meet Army Rangers John “Hannibal” Smith (Liam Neeson)
and Templeton “Faceman” Peck (Bradley Cooper), whose mission to bring down
General Javier Tuco (Yul Vazquez) is going badly. To save Face's
bacon, Hannibal needs a ride, and finds it from former Ranger Bosco “BA”
Baracus (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson). With Tuco's goons in hot pursuit,
they all need a pilot to escape the country, and mental patient H.M. Murdock
(Sharlton Copley) is just the ticket. The A-Team is born. Years
later, they're serving in Iraq together under the command of General Morrison
(Gerald McRaney), when a CIA man calling himself Lynch (Patrick Wilson)
approaches Hannibal about a rouge printing press and plates that could
allow insurgents to flood the world with unbacked American currency.
Army bigwig and former Face flame Charisa Sosa (Jessica Biel) warns them
to stay far away from the mission, but Hannibal insists on trying to recover
the plates, with Morrison's off-the-record permission to pursue an illegal
op that's technically the responsibility of trigger-happy contractor Pike
(Brian Bloom). It all goes horribly awry, with Morrison killed in
an explosion and no one to prove that the mission was sanctioned.
The team is court-martialed and sentenced to ten years in prison, but Lynch
intervenes and stages Hannibal's escape. One after another, he springs
his fellow team members, because for the A-Team, the mission isn't over
until the plates are recovered and the bad guys are brought to justice.
What makes The A-Team
work is its commitment to the Cannell Code: no matter how much danger and
betrayal they face, it sure must be fun to be part of the team. BA
might be afraid to fly, and Hannibal might bear the weight of life and
death decisions for his men, but at the end of the day no one here would
rather be anywhere else but having this adventure. The villains are
crazy and fun, and even stoic Cpt. Sosa comes around to the A-Team way
of thinking. Hell, even Mahatma Gandhi is presumed to ride with the
Team once Hannibal’s done using his quotes to shoot down BA’s misguided
flirtation with pacifism. If even Gandhi’s down with pummeling the
bad guys, who am I to argue?
Massive stunt and action
sequences inconceivable on a TV budget add to the fun, particularly a delightful
sequence where Face must first blast away at drone planes in a free-falling
tank and then the Team uses the guns to “fly” the tank toward a nearby
lake before it crashes to the ground. Murdock’s crazy aerial stunts
effectively convey his Howling Madness, and a climactic rumble on a sinking
ship admidst dozens of tumbling shipping containers is flat-out nifty.
Carnahan favors the Michael Bay editing style, which takes away from the
smoothness and momentum of the action scenes, but because they’re filled
with imagination and delightful banter, it wasn’t really an issue for me.
The key to The A-Team’s
TV success was the four spirited performances in the leading roles and
their cinematic counterparts do a remarkable job of combining impersonation
and homage to create a living, breathing A-Team no one could mistake for
anyone else. The past thirty years have changed a lot about the way
we perceive the military, and the new movie gives the Team a Band of Brothers
camaraderie that’s substantially warmer than the original group’s without
undercutting each character’s shtick. Neeson proved his action hero
chops in Taken, and builds on that movie’s impressive
display of macho warmth as “the old man” who’s both fearless leader and
father figure to the Team without ever losing his cigar-chomping sense
of humor. Cooper gets the Faceman charm down, while also responding
to the script’s amping-up of his skill with a gun. He can be said
to give the most spirited performance in a movie full of them, and shares
solid lived-in chemistry with his old partner Hannibal. Jackson knows
just how to modulate BA, the tough guy who was also every 80's kid's fantasy
Big Brother, mixing his short fuse with a generous amount of warmth.
And Copley does the best job of all the actors mimicking his predecessor.
Dwight Schultz's Murdock was way, way over the top, but the key to the
performance was the playfulness you got by asking a dramatic actor to get
all crazy that way as opposed to a comedian. Copley, making his second
feature after his auspicious debut as the star of District
9, does a brilliant job of positioning Howling Mad as a man who's serious
about being crazy to the point where you can never be sure how much of
his insanity is simply a show. And as good as each individual performance
is, the whole is greater even than the sum of its parts because their A-Team
is a team in the truest sense, enjoying wonderful chemistry I'd love to
see them revisit in a full-blown franchise.
The supporting players get
to have their fun as well, led by Wilson's delightfully out-of-his-element
Lynch, who knows how to run a conspiracy, but not so much how to get his
hands dirty in executing it himself. Bloom, who co-wrote the script,
gave himself a plum role as the odious military contractor (seriously,
does anybody like those guys? Their approval ratings have to be somewhere
between Bin Laden and BP) who shares the skill and job satisfaction of
the A-Team, but none of their virtues. One particularly delightful
scene finds Pike in the back seat of Lynch's car about to be assassinated
by his men, except that they can't seem to figure out how to put the silencer
on the gun and a disgusted Pike has to talk them through his own pending
execution. It's moments like that that really make the movie sing.
Elsewhere, Biel goes a fine job with “the Tommy Lee Jones role”, and can
always be relied upon as the most beautiful woman you can actually believe
is in the military. Veteran TV star McRaney (who was solving mysteries
as half of Simon & Simon during The A-Team's heyday)
oozes fatherly warmth in a rare big screen appearance. Make sure
you stay until the credits are done for cameos from two of the original
team that might not have quite fit the movie tonally but are nicely preserved
as deleted scenes you don't need to buy the DVD for.
Like its' televised forbearer,
The
A-Team is very much a product of its time, with amped-up violence (at
least insofar as people actually die: a building could have fallen
on one of the original's villains and we'd have cut to a shot of him dusting
himself off and declaring himself OK) and a very modern editing scheme.
But it's also a delightful shout-out to a day gone by when Steven J. Cannell
knew that the evil in the world was no reason not to smile, it just needed
a firm ass-whooping. As a fan, it's really hard to imagine anyone
making a better tribute to the show's spirit of violent good-guy camaraderie
than Joe Carnahan has: I love it when a plan comes together! |
