Richard’s Year of Movies — The A-Team

I have fond memories of the original A-Team series because I never actually watched it.  I’m pretty sure I saw bits and pieces of plenty of episodes, but to save my life I couldn’t describe a single one to you.  Well, not beyond “They get a job to … defeat some kind of bad guys, and at some point they build some crazy contraption to help them along.  And stuff gets shot and blown up.  And Mr. T says, ‘Fool!’  A lot.”  And there’s probably not a lot of people with enough of a memory of the show to dispute that.  It was a big dumb action show.

And they were smart enough to just make a big dumb action movie out of it.  They didn’t try to get all meta and ironic and comment on how cheesy the show was, or turn it into some kind of comedy with Ben Stiller as Face and oh god I’ve probably given someone in Hollywood a horrible idea.  Too many TV-to-movie projects look at The Brady Bunch Movie and think, “We can do that too!”  Only they can’t.  And so you get Bewitched and Starsky and Hutch.  And nobody needs that.

So the A-Team movie just takes what’s memorable about the TV show and makes it bigger and louder, and if that ain’t what you’re looking for in a summer movie, I can’t help you.  The script certainly won’t stand up to scrutiny, but the great thing is that the actors know that, and so their characters all have this, “Are we seriously doing this?” attitude that’s a nice break from all the deadly serious action heroes we seem to be getting these days.  I prefer my mindless violence without someone ruining my buzz by acting all angsty over it, thank you very much.