The A Team -Boom!!

You must have been living in a cave if you had not heard that there was an A-Team movie on the horizon. For months now we have had the image of Liam Neeson's grizzled profile imprinted on our minds and that bloody song in our heads. One look at the trailer shows you that the film has enough decent actors in it to make a halfway good job of it. Right?

The trouble is, one look at the trailer shows you all the best bits and after that there really is no need to go and actually see it.

Written by a videogame voice actor called Brian Bloom, and a director whose most notable outing is Smokin' Aces, it's best not to go into the cinema with high expectations. Unless of course, you expect ridiculous amounts of explosions and daft action set pieces left, right and centre. In which case the co-producers Tony and Ridley Scott have got you covered. Shame they couldn't step behind the camera just for a peek at what the 'directors' were up to. The acting talent is the best thing out there by a country mile. Liam Neeson, whose record speaks for itself. Bradley Cooper has a string of very accomplished comedy flicks behind him. Sharlto Copley, he of District 9 fame. Finally however there is Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson. Most notably of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. Oh yes, and Jessica Biel, who I assume is in there because she's hot?

Granted, the first third of the movie is pretty decent. We get introduced to all the characters, Liam Neeson's Hannibal Smith being the best of the batch. Next is B.A Baracus, (Jackson), and we all know who plays him best, so suffice it to say his first bit of screen time is a look at his tattooed knuckles and a black mohawk, probably the only way the director could introduce this character without ruining Mr T forever. So they team up and head off to get Faceman, (Bradley Cooper), out of a jam and assassinate some Mexican guy in the process. They get him out and get the job done with the help of an insane git with a helicopter, Murdoch (Copley), pulls all sorts of ridiculous aerobatic stunts which give B.A his fear of flying, and a fighter jet from Arizona takes out the pursuing Mexican bloke.

Ok, so that's the start. We see all of our heroes; Rampage does an acceptable job of playing a guy that was played by a guy who is the most quoted guy ever. Hannibal is a bad ass colonel in the Rangers and plans special missions to perfection. Murdoch is a madman who could land a dishwasher if you said it could fly, and Faceman is a bit of a ladies man. It is, quite frankly, a perfect start for a subject with such a huge cult following that it could not hope to live up to.

However it peeks here too. There is a pretty messy storyline, involving some counterfeit money printing plates, and about a billion dollars in cash which the Iraqi Army are planning to drive out of Bagdhad in a lorry. For some reason the US Army can't go back in so they send the A-Team, and with the aid of another plan from Hannibal, they get it out, but are set up in the process by rival special forces squad the Black Forest. But the film has already started to go downhill when all the double crossing starts. The team gets put in jail and escape, ridiculously, and set about going after the people who set them up. But there are so many different groups involved it becomes very hard to really know what’s going on. So the rest of the film is then disguised in a big old ridiculous action sequence interspersed with a bit of Faceman and Jessica Biels characters passed relationship.

In short then, The A-Team lacks the one thing that even action movies can’t do without, and that’s a plot. Then it tries to make it better by blowing the living crap out of everything. It starts well but quickly turns rather messy, a bit of a kid’s action movie like Commando or something. Plenty of scope for sequels though, woohoo.

Andrew Revill