Pity the fool

For all the explosions and vehicular collisions, The A-Team is a stupefyingly underwhelming movie.

For all the explosions, the near-death experiences, and the vehicular collisions, The A-Team is a stupefyingly underwhelming movie. As buildings collapse, cars blow up, bullets are sprayed and people die, you, the viewer, remain stolidly unmoved. All you need to know to follow the convoluted, chaotic plotline is who the good guys are: Faceman Peck (Bradley Cooper), BA Baracus (Quinton Rampage Jackson), and HM Murdock (Sharlto Copley). Led by the inscrutable Colonel Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson) these four American soldiers form an elite combat unit.

Hannibal, the brains (if you will) behind the team, concocts precisely calculated plans which somehow never get botched — until the boys set off on a mission to recover stolen US treasury plates in Iraq. Hannibal’s team goes on a covert black ops mission for the CIA, acting in apparent defiance of commanding officer Morrison’s orders and when Morrison is found dead, the A-Team is charged with treason, dishonourably discharged from service and locked up. Being the boys they are though, they escape the high security army confinement facility and go on a rogue mission to recover the plates and clear their name.

The original A-Team was accused of being sexist and the bluster of this one proves again that it is clearly for the boys. In the 80s TV series, the women were either eye candy a la Tawnia Baker (played by Marla Heasley), or wistful hangers-on like the reporter Amy Amanda Allen who couldn’t be part of the boys band but lingered on the peripheries. In this age of political correctness, The A-Team solves the sex problem by having an incredibly sexy Jessica Biel play Charissa Sosa, a DCIS captain and former flame of Peckman’s. Sosa gets relegated to lieutenant after the boys disregard her warning to stay away from the plates, and is now out to get the plates before they do. In essence though, her task seems to be to keep the boys in check as they scamper around, up to their dangerous ploys, and she often looks like a harangued babysitter or a disapproving schoolmarm.

Still, the film is not entirely without its moments of pleasure, even for a female viewer. Like the time when the team’s plane explodes and they ‘fly’ a tank by shooting rounds off. I have yet to figure out how Hannibal escaped from the cremation machine unscorched, where the plates were through the duration of the film (or why they were so important) and who the bad guy really was. Still, none of that matters because, as the narration at the end testifies, the point of this movie is not logic, nor even entertainment, but just to evoke a transitory nostalgia for the eighties.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2010.