The A-Team
The A-Team
Directed by Joe Carnahan
Runtime: 117 min.
"Well that’s awesome!" art-movie regular Patrick
Wilson says after a violent climax in The A-Team. "That looks just like Call
of Duty, doesn’t it?" Wilson ignores that he’s 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, cynically—and
vividly—revived 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), he’s 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 we’re all in on: that Hollywood reboots are simply mercenary.
The A-Team doesn’t look like any participants thought they
were making art: The Call of Duty reference is hilarious since this isn’t even
a streamlined video game. It’s opportunism—the dumb, macho, adolescent,
glass-smashingest movie of the year—because 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, Cooper’s perma-smirk is sexier than Dirk
Benedict, or Neeson’s solemnity is more better than George Peppard’s 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 spies—from Wilson on, all of them are named Lynch and personified
full-circle by TV’s Jon Hamm. It doesn’t try for ingenuity like Micmacs or Three
Kings or even The Losers. Such flagrant brand-merchandising even excuses the
romance between Cooper and Jessica Biel that no human being could believe
anyway. Like Wilson’s Call of Duty shout-out, The A-Team isn’t "bad,"
it’s just straightforward gimcrack and commercialism. If you don’t know this,
then what do you know?