The A-Team
The A-Team
Directed by Joe Carnahan
Runtime: 117 min.
"Well thats awesome!" art-movie regular Patrick Wilson says after a violent climax in The A-Team. "That looks just like Call of Duty, doesnt it?" Wilson ignores that hes in a 1980s TV-series reboot and name-checks a video game instead because this movie version of The A-Team goes both ways. He seems tickled about how Hollywood has shrewdly, cynicallyand vividlyrevived the old TV brand.
Wilson can easily go back to the pretentious crap of Little Children because, like his co-stars Liam Neeson (as Hannibal), Bradley Cooper (as Face), Sharlto Copley (as Murdoch) and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson (as B.A. Baracas), hes following the same 21st-century template as Robert Downey Jr. and the pseudo-serious actors making a payday in the Iron Man movies. Wilson admits the joke were all in on: that Hollywood reboots are simply mercenary.
The A-Team doesnt look like any participants thought they were making art: The Call of Duty reference is hilarious since this isnt even a streamlined video game. Its opportunismthe dumb, macho, adolescent, glass-smashingest movie of the yearbecause all that noise, destruction and dynamism typifies the decline of popular entertainment. Multiple montages where scale-model planning sessions are intercut with flash-forward live-action enactments simply waste technique. The sick joke of anybody expecting quality from The A-Team (or [Sex and the City 2]) only proves how TV habits have coarsened movie expectations.
As a moviegoer, not a TV geek, I have no stake in whether Jackson is as amusing as Mr. T, Coopers perma-smirk is sexier than Dirk Benedict, or Neesons solemnity is more better than George Peppards suave gravity. Instead, I note that director Joe Carnahan seems to have found his metier in TV junk. With the dazzling assistance of cinematographer Mauro Fiore (Avatar), The A-Team is absolutely fun-looking. The climactic avalanche of multi-color freight containers is an abstract delight: from above it suggests a pile of orange, red, yellow, blue, green, purple pick-up sticks.
The A-Team stays true to its TV origins when the rogue team of alpha-male heroes leave their military duties in the Middle East to combat nefarious contractors (led by green-eyed, balding co-screenwriter Brian Bloom) and government spiesfrom Wilson on, all of them are named Lynch and personified full-circle by TVs Jon Hamm. It doesnt try for ingenuity like [Micmacs] or Three Kings or even [The Losers](http://www.nypress.com/article-21142-no-losers-here.html). Such flagrant brand-merchandising even excuses the romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel that no human being could believe anyway. Like Wilsons Call of Duty shout-out, The A-Team isnt "bad," its just straightforward gimcrack and commercialism. If you dont know this, then what do you know?