A? Not Even Close!

I still clearly recall the sickest I've been in the last decade. This hurricane of disease had me laid out on the couch for days. This was pre-Netflix (and Instant Queue), so laying there watching TV meant actually watching TV. I was too exhausted to do anything but watch whatever was on.

What was on was a back-to-back-to-back showing of three 80s TV shows I absolutely loved when they originally ran: Knight Rider, Airwolf, and The A-Team. And when the "marathon" was over, I felt even more awful than I had before. It turned out that each of these shows actually kind of sucked. My memory of them was pristine, but the reality was that they were the schlockiest of schlocky 80s television.

Needless to say, this memory kept any interest I had in going to see last year's big screen film remake of The A-Team in theaters. It should have kept me from seeing it, period. But after being pleasantly surprised by Liam Neeson's performance in the shouldn't-have-been-as-good-as-it-was Taken, I decided that maybe his take on Hannibal Smith would make The A-Team worthwhile.

But as smart a movie as Taken managed to be at times, The A-Team was equally dumb more times. Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, and Sharlto Copley all really have fun and ham it up in their roles (as does Jessica Biel), but they have surprisingly little rapport with one another. The dialogue is a low-grade Madlib where every other blank is filled with "ranger." The evil plot is a benign and boring mismatch to preposterously over the top action sequences (such as trying to steer a tank that fell out of a plane by using its cannon). The visual effects seem rough and unfinished for a big budget summer movie, particularly in the climax set in a shipyard where enormous shipping containers appear plastic-like and seem to have no weight at all.

You have to give a few points for the level of commitment at which the actors embrace the stupid. And then a few more points for the post-credits cameos of Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz (not to mention the several in-jokes made in reference to the original cast throughout the movie). Still, even those points can only bring this loud disappointment up to a D+. Utter waste of time.