Not every remake is an affront to the film gods.
So much as dare to touch “Casablanca,” and you’ll be tarred and feathered before you can even pitch your project.
But remaking “The A-Team,” the ’80s TV romp, is another matter.
How badly can you bungle the source material?
Dialogue like, “I pity the fool!” and “I love it when a plan comes together” isn’t exactly Mamet-level jabber.
And isn’t a throwaway action show ripe for today’s blockbuster assembly line?
It’s still to director Joe Carnahan’s credit that he found the right balance between humor and ludicrous action while updating the show’s curious barrage of characters.
“The A-Team” follows a quartet of elite soldiers asked to recover counterfeit plates threatening to flood Iraq with U.S. currency.
The mission is exactly the kind this oddball group excels in, but a double cross is in the works. Suddenly, the team must clear its name before spending the remainder of the movie behind bars.
The film’s opening sequence is its best, a look at how the characters first met during a fracas south of the border. Carnahan toys with the show’s legacy – B.A. Barracus (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson) sports the words “pity” and “fool” on his knuckles – and delivers a few tasty escapes that reveal how resourceful these boys can be.
Liam Neeson is the rock of the cast as Hannibal, the team leader. He’s given the least flashy role but brings a dollop of reality to some pretty unreal scenarios.
You don’t see tanks falling out of the sky – and landing in one piece – very often.
Bradley Cooper leverages his God-given mug as Face, the womanizer who gets to tangle with an old flame (Jessica Biel in a wasted role).
The wild card is Sharlto Copley, who burst on the scene with “District 9″ and plays Murdock with the expected sense of mania. But it’s in his shadings where we see a potential star, an actor with the right gleam in his eye to power other, more competently detailed characters.
He’s the actor most likely to use the widely screened film as a career springboard. Good for him.
The film’s final moments are an unholy mess, the result of a film that pushes logic to such extremes that the only option thing left is to stage an incomprehensible finale.
It’s wonder if even the actors themselves can follow the mayhem.
“The A-Team” ends with – no spoiler warning required – a set-up for a sequel. And if the original show could last multiple seasons there’s little reason a mindless popcorn muncher like this might not spawn more hyper-adventures.
(Photo: Face (Bradley Cooper) remains defiant, despite his imprisonment in a stack of tires in the opening moments of “The A-Team.” Photo credit: Doug Curran)
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I saw the film this afternoon, good fun but you need a high tolerance for the ridiculous, extremely high tolerance.
They were able to strike the right balance between honoring the original source material and updating it. But I think it would have made an even better film if they had reigned in the more fantastic action set pieces to something a little more plausible.
All the actors did an excellent job, my only small complaint is Copley’s accent seemed to be all over the place.
The story did seem to be a little too convoluted and parts of it didn’t make sense logically or otherwise even in the world of The A-Team.
My only major complaint is the dam shaky cam and ultra fast cut editing makes some of the fight/action pieces incomprehensible and simply hard to watch.