The A-Team movie didn't do as well as expected at the US box office. It lost the battle to another 80s remake, The Karate Kid. I had a hard time understanding why before I'd seen the movie. As a child of the 80s, while I thought The Karate Kid was an OK flick, The A-Team dominated my youth. I loved that show, and I'd been looking forward to a big screen remake for years. We've had to wait a few more weeks for The A-Team to burst into the UK, but after finally seeing the movie... I now have a REALLY hard time understanding why it lost out to Jackie Chan, Will Smith's kid and a bit of rubbish kung-fu.
Because The A-Team movie does exactly what you want it to do. It doesn't try to re-invent the wheel. It doesn't try to make the A-Team believable or hardboiled or treat the concept with a seriousness it doesn't merit... yet neither does it mock the show (and our memories) in the way other big screen adaps have done (stand up, Starsky & Hutch). It says - you know what, The A-Team should be big and loud and brash and outrageous... but most of all, it should be fun.
They could so easily have screwed this up. It's simple enough to cast some black dude with a mohawk and have him say "I ain't getting on no plane, fool" a few times to satisfy the fans. And the rest of the team could have been reduced to their broadest strokes and replicated too - the handsome playboy, the crazy pilot, the silver-haired, cigar chomping leader. Yet the writers here have actually tried - and mostly succeeded - to give what could have been merely caricatures a little depth and development. The casting is perfect. At no point did I think, "that's Liam Neeson". I actually believed it was Hannibal Smith, from the start. George Peppard would be proud. Likewise Bradley Cooper captures that same mix of charm and vulnerability that Dirk Benedict did so well, and District 9's Sharlo Copley gives us a Murdock who's both Howling Mad and really quite sweet. Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson wins the battle with Mr. T, going beyond bluster and bling to be the surprise of the show. And yes, we do get to discover exactly why he doesn't want to get on no planes, fool.
There's slimy support from the always excellent Patrick Wilson and another 80s hero - Simon & Simon's Gerald McRaney (George Hearst in Deadwood); plus a nice cameo from Don Draper himself, John Hamm. (Sadly I missed the Schultz and Benedict cameos as nobody warned me to wait around till after the credits.) The only character who gets shortchanged is Jessica Biel's one-dimensional love interest / super agent, as forgettable in her way as the original Amy Amanda Allen... I guess this always was a show where the guys dominated.
The stunts are utterly ridiculous, the gags are frequently hilarious, the catchphrases, vehicles and gadgets are all given due consideration... really, what else could you want from an A-Team movie?
The Karate Kid? Bah!
