Film review: The A-Team

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 16:32

THE A-TEAM (12A) * DIRECTED BY: JOE CARNAHAN STARRING: LIAM NEESON, BRADLEY COOPER, QUINTON JACKSON, SHARLTO COPLEY

EARLY on in The A-Team - the noisy, boring, pointless big screen update of the television show of the same name - an I-can't-believe-I-signed-on-for-this Liam Neeson outlines the film's guiding creative principle: "No matter how random things may appear, there's still a plan." The character he's playing, George Peppard Hannibal Smith, a silver-haired, stogie-smoking Airborne Ranger with a fluctuating accent, then smiles an exaggerated ha-ha-ha-ha smile, as if to say, "Don't worry if the incoherent jumble of images you're about to see makes no sense as a movie, just think of it as brain-off entertainment, not a waste of your time and money."

The trouble with this kind of we-know-it's-crap attitude to filmmaking, especially when it comes to big-budget movies, is that it often feels more contemptuous than conspiratorial: as if we're being smugly expected to indulge a director's anything-will-do incompetence, not genuinely laugh along with the film in a self-knowing way. The latter at least requires a filmmaker to have some understanding of what they're trying to achieve. The former merely needs them to string together lots of explosions with words that sound vaguely like exposition.

That co-writer and director Joe Carnahan (Smokin' Aces) has no idea what to do with The A-Team's naff, nearly 30-year-old source material is evident from the off. Though he assumes plenty of ironic awareness of the characters he still spends the whole film repeatedly introducing and explaining them to us, while failing to nail a tone that could possibly justify such indulgence. Thus, in between winking utterances of Hannibal's "I love it when a plan comes together" line and Mr T BA Baracus (Quinton Jackson) calling people "fool", we're treated to jingoistic support-the-troops rhetoric and straight-faced Gandhi quotes as Carnahan spends two thudding hours outlining the A-Team's origins as an "Alpha" team of elite combat soldiers betrayed by their government during the dying days of the Iraq War.

The TV show dispensed with the back story in the opening credits (though in 1983, they were 'Nam veterans), but Carnahan and his writers are so enamoured with it they've supplied it with a back story of its own that itself comes with an origins story. The end result is like a Christopher Nolan movie for mouth-breathers: needlessly incoherent and utterly stupid.

The film begins, for instance, with a credit sequence that shows the origins of the team, which also includes cheerful womaniser Dirk Benedict Face (The Hangover's Bradley Cooper) and psycho pilot Dwight Shultz "Howling Mad" Murdoch (District 9 alumnus Sharlto Copley). A good place to start, you might think - except this excessive credit sequence lasts as long as the first act of most films and only ends with the team being deployed to Iraq.

The film then tries to trick us into thinking we're seeing the origins of the team being betrayed by their government as a rogue CIA mission to liberate money-printing plates from downtown Baghdad leaves them framed for a crime they didn't commit, dishonourably discharged and thrown in a jail from which they promptly escape. But even though we're more than an hour into the film, it soon becomes apparent this is merely a forerunner of the real betrayal that will turn the guys into soldiers of fortune and allow Carnahan to end the film where the TV show effectively began.

There's no need for this, especially when the should-know-better cast are doing little more than charisma-free impressions of their TV forebears and the wall-to-wall action is so mind-numbingly dull. Whether the A-Team are trying to fly a tank, destroy an dock or evade a bunch of bad guys who like to monologue just long enough to allow a slow motion van or motorbike to knock them out the way, it's all shot and edited in a cut-to-ribbons, unsatisfying, no-stakes CGI way.

But who cares, right? It's a movie version of The A-Team. What does it matter if it's dumb and loud and doesn't make sense? With its "to be continued" style ending (featuring Mad Men's Jon Hamm), the plan with this random-seeming movie is clearly to create a new franchise, not to offer a film to genuinely entertain people.

But having already stiffed in the US - grossing in two months what it was expected to take in its opening weekend - this might be one plan that, mercifully, doesn't come together.

l The A-Team is out on Friday