So I sort of ended up writing the following review of "The A-Team" while I was debating the film's merits with my pal Scott Dally on the "Cort and Fatboy" message boards....
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The upshot: IMHO, "The A-Team." is noisy, senseless, confusing, CGI-choked, charmless, plotty, over-edited crap.
Mild spoilers to follow.
I wasn't looking for "Othello." I was looking for "The A-Team," or at least for something with the basic charms of the goofy/stupid TV series -- i.e., I wanted something with crazy real-world stunts and four vivid, funny characters who had a lot of room to interact and play around.
In my opinion, I got neither of those. My beefs with the film are these:
1. The story is confusing and overly twisty as hell. From the coincidence-driven opening (Hannibal coincidentally meets B.A. Baracus while running miles across a field to save the Faceman? Really?) to the bizarrely convoluted set-ups and double-crosses that put the boys in and out of prison to the two different squads of intelligence personnel hunting The A-Team (and each other) to the weird digressive trips to other countries, the script feels like eight different scripts crudely stitched together.
I read this Nikki Finke piece on the movie's convoluted, 11-writer development process after I saw the film, and everything suddenly clicked into place. "Oh," I said to myself, "so that's why there's this weird 'Bourne Identity' bit in the middle where they go to Frankfurt. Because the producers were basically telling these endless teams of writers to copy whatever was hot at the moment." Instead of, you know, improving on the actual vibe of, say, "The A-Team."
Also: the needless extra subplots. B.A. Baracus spending most of the movie with no mohawk having taken a vow of nonviolence? The Faceman/Biel romance subplot? The long scenes with the Blackwater guys and the CIA and Biel's team fencing with each other? All of it choked up the story until I simply didn't care any more. Can you even tell me why Biel's team was so upset about Hannibal going after the plates to begin with, before the frame-up?
2. It isn't funny. I might have forgiven the convolution if the movie actually had some charm and fun character interplay, but the sheer plotty noise of the script and Carnahan's weirdly grim-faced direction of same never allows that to happen. The casting isn't bad, but no one gets much of a chance to shine. Take, for example, the scene in the plummeting tank. The idea of "banter" in that scene is four guys yelling and screaming over each other.
(The funny thing is, banter was the thing Stephen J. Cannell was best at -- the best moments of Culp's screwball "Greatest American Hero" dialogue come to mind.)
There's also a shocking lack of fun in Murdock's insanity -- in fact, he seems to turn completely sane before the end of the film, and he's barely used in the big fat bombastic climax. His interaction with B.A. Baracus, which was maybe the core conflict of the show, is this:
- B.A. gets upset with Murdock.
- Murdock offers B.A. some food.
- Conflict over.
- Rinse and repeat.
A film version of a TV show should mean that Hollywood has hired its best and brightest to take everything that was great about that show and do it better, with a budget. The best thing about "The A-Team" is its characters. We remember those more than we remember any of the stupid stories about the boys fighting corrupt firefighters or whatever the sleazy official of the week was up to.
This movie just straight-up drowns the characters in a big pile of shaky-cam kablooey.
3. The action scenes suck. Hard. Like I said on the show today, I leaned over to Ryan during the screening and said, "Gee, I sure hope the CGI thing catches the other CGI thing in time." The great thing about '80s action TV was that it was this crazy golden time for sick, real-world helicopter stunts. But every helicopter scene in this flick is computer-generated, and the choppers are doing stuff that would be embarrassingly implausible in "Blue Thunder" -- flying upside-down, plucking falling people out of the sky right on cue, dodging heat-seeking missiles. The action-packed climax is a bunch of pixels falling all over each other and our heroes pretending to dodge it, endlessly.
I don't see stuntmen in this flick -- I see teams of bearded, pear-shaped men hunched over keyboards with shit-tons of processing power. That really wasn't what I wanted from "The A-Team."
There were a few moments I liked. The scene with the CIA guys and the Blackwater fellow in the car, where the Blackwater guy is trying to teach the CIA rookie how to put on a silencer. Fleeting moments of character interplay. B.A.'s escape from the prison bus. Some of Bradley Cooper's bits where he hinted at Templeton Peck's mad skills as a fixer and ladies' man.
But it never gelled into a whole movie for me, and I'm just sort of insanely allergic to the counter-argument that I'm supposed to hang up my brain and enjoy the ride. I've seen too many popcorn flicks that satisfied me on a dramatic and a visceral level ("Star Wars," Indiana Jones, "Back to the Future," the Bourne flicks, the better Cameron stuff) to settle for that. Like Cort said on Friday's show, to me it felt like one long numbing highlight reel.
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'The A-Team' movie review (Cort and Fatboy message boards)
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