I saw The A-Team over the weekend. It's good. Really good. Like...really good. I mean, if you're into that sort of film. Obviously, if you're a mainly an aficionado of French cinema or something, seeing a tank fall out of an airplane and plummet to the ground while the heroes shoot down drones with the tank's machine gun, probably won't do much for you. But if you can appreciate a good action film, I can pretty much guarantee a good time will be had.
I was surprised I liked it so much because of two things: 1) I thought the first trailer was absolutely godawful, and 2) When you get right down to it, the original A-Team was a terrible, terrible show. In fact, this might be the first time a film adaptation of a TV show is superior to the original in every single way possible.
Here's what I remember about The A-Team from when I was a kid:
-- George Peppard (on the show, anyway; I don't think I've ever seen him in anything else) was the hammiest actor to ever ham it up on-screen. The guy made Shatner look like a Shakespearean-trained thespian. Granted, it's hard to say lines like, "I love it when a plan comes together," with a straight face, usually with a cigar in your mouth, but it's not like Peppard really seemed to make much of an effort. The other actors weren't much better. Mr. T. was...well, Mr. T. He basically just seemed to be playing himself. Dirk Benedict always came off a little too smarmy. Dwight Schultz was good (and indeed, the one actor from the TV show that I thought was maybe better than his movie counterpart), but he never got to do much besides badly-written comic relief.
-- No one ever got killed. I mean, sure, maybe a minor character would die to kick off the plot (i.e., "When her father is murdered, a woman hires the A-Team to help her protect her father's investment in a South African diamond mine. A ruthless South African businessman will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to steal it from her."), but I'm fairly certain that the A-Team, in the five seasons the show was on the air, never actually killed a single person. Which, depending on how you look at it, makes them either the most impressive team of mercenaries in the world or the most boring team of mercenaries in the world. It was the live-action equivalent of the G.I. Joe cartoon, where no one was ever fatally injured and whenever a plane got shot down, you always saw the pilot's parachute open. By way of comparison, in his first five seasons, Jack Bauer killed 139 people all by himself.
-- The basic premise of the show was pretty weak. Four Vietnam vets framed for a crime they didn't commit and on the run from the government, rather than devoting all their efforts to clearing their names, just drove around the country in the most conspicuous van ever made, helping people in trouble. Ostensibly for money, since they were, after all, soldiers of fortune and had no other way of paying for all that gas they must have used, but I don't remember money exchanging hands too often. Going over the list of episodes, it seems as if a great deal of them involved the A-Team helping someone who was either being forced off their land, or whose business was being harassed by a competitor. I honestly can't believe they managed to squeeze five seasons out of that.
-- When I was a little kid, my friends and I would play A-Team during recess. I can't really remember what playing A-Team entailed, although I do remember the teacher yelling at us a couple of times, so I suspect it mainly involved pretending the other kids were forcing someone off their land or whatever, and beating up on them.
Obviously, everyone wanted to be B.A. (Actually, now that I think about it, it's interesting that a bunch of white kids at a mostly all-white school in Texas in the early 80s were constantly fighting over who would get to be the black character. Give Mr. T credit for breaking down racial barriers.) After that, it was a toss-up between Hannibal and Face. Face was cooler, but if you were Hannibal, everyone else--even B.A.--had to do what you said, being that you were the leader and all. Whoever couldn't make a case as to why he should be playing B.A., Face or Hannibal, was stuck being Murdock. That was usually me. It could have been worse, I guess. If we'd had a fifth kid in our little group, I might have been forced to be the reporter chick who occasionally tagged along with them on their missions.
Anyway, go see The A-Team. I don't say this very often, but this is one of those rare instances where the 21st century has taken something from the glorious decade that was the 80s and somehow found a way to make it better.
I was surprised I liked it so much because of two things: 1) I thought the first trailer was absolutely godawful, and 2) When you get right down to it, the original A-Team was a terrible, terrible show. In fact, this might be the first time a film adaptation of a TV show is superior to the original in every single way possible.
Here's what I remember about The A-Team from when I was a kid:
-- George Peppard (on the show, anyway; I don't think I've ever seen him in anything else) was the hammiest actor to ever ham it up on-screen. The guy made Shatner look like a Shakespearean-trained thespian. Granted, it's hard to say lines like, "I love it when a plan comes together," with a straight face, usually with a cigar in your mouth, but it's not like Peppard really seemed to make much of an effort. The other actors weren't much better. Mr. T. was...well, Mr. T. He basically just seemed to be playing himself. Dirk Benedict always came off a little too smarmy. Dwight Schultz was good (and indeed, the one actor from the TV show that I thought was maybe better than his movie counterpart), but he never got to do much besides badly-written comic relief.
-- No one ever got killed. I mean, sure, maybe a minor character would die to kick off the plot (i.e., "When her father is murdered, a woman hires the A-Team to help her protect her father's investment in a South African diamond mine. A ruthless South African businessman will stop at nothing -- even murder -- to steal it from her."), but I'm fairly certain that the A-Team, in the five seasons the show was on the air, never actually killed a single person. Which, depending on how you look at it, makes them either the most impressive team of mercenaries in the world or the most boring team of mercenaries in the world. It was the live-action equivalent of the G.I. Joe cartoon, where no one was ever fatally injured and whenever a plane got shot down, you always saw the pilot's parachute open. By way of comparison, in his first five seasons, Jack Bauer killed 139 people all by himself.
-- The basic premise of the show was pretty weak. Four Vietnam vets framed for a crime they didn't commit and on the run from the government, rather than devoting all their efforts to clearing their names, just drove around the country in the most conspicuous van ever made, helping people in trouble. Ostensibly for money, since they were, after all, soldiers of fortune and had no other way of paying for all that gas they must have used, but I don't remember money exchanging hands too often. Going over the list of episodes, it seems as if a great deal of them involved the A-Team helping someone who was either being forced off their land, or whose business was being harassed by a competitor. I honestly can't believe they managed to squeeze five seasons out of that.
-- When I was a little kid, my friends and I would play A-Team during recess. I can't really remember what playing A-Team entailed, although I do remember the teacher yelling at us a couple of times, so I suspect it mainly involved pretending the other kids were forcing someone off their land or whatever, and beating up on them.
Obviously, everyone wanted to be B.A. (Actually, now that I think about it, it's interesting that a bunch of white kids at a mostly all-white school in Texas in the early 80s were constantly fighting over who would get to be the black character. Give Mr. T credit for breaking down racial barriers.) After that, it was a toss-up between Hannibal and Face. Face was cooler, but if you were Hannibal, everyone else--even B.A.--had to do what you said, being that you were the leader and all. Whoever couldn't make a case as to why he should be playing B.A., Face or Hannibal, was stuck being Murdock. That was usually me. It could have been worse, I guess. If we'd had a fifth kid in our little group, I might have been forced to be the reporter chick who occasionally tagged along with them on their missions.
Anyway, go see The A-Team. I don't say this very often, but this is one of those rare instances where the 21st century has taken something from the glorious decade that was the 80s and somehow found a way to make it better.
1 comments:
Shatner WAS Shakespearian trained!
(WTF does that even mean? But he was!)
Post a Comment