****REPOSTED FROM THE LATE, LATE SHOW WITH NEW COMMENTS/EDITS****
Picture it: southern California, circa (mumble) 1984. A group of boys in sleeping bags are watching the television. It's Friday night, and the regular weekend sleepover was in full effect. None of us went to school together, so the weekend was the only time we got to see each other even though we lived within a few houses of each other. The A-Team was on. Dukes of Hazard was coming. Life was really good.
The A-Team on television was one of my favorite childhood memories (so imagine my shock that George Peppard was also in Breakfast At Tiffany's). I had the lunchbox, the toys, and I could quote Mr. T at length. When I heard they were making this into a movie, I nearly dropped a kidney. I worried that my own expectations of this would be too high, that I'd force the movie to fail by sheer force of will (I do have that power).
In many ways, this was, in my opinion the benchmark summer movie of 2010. Do I kind of not like most of the cast? I kind of don't like most of the cast, but even I can't deny that this was crazy, action-filled fun. While this wasn't high drama, this movie didn't aim to be something it wasn't and didn't suffer from pretensions. Hard for me not to respect an effort like this.
For a change, the casting director bordered on the genius and probably should be burned as a witch. These four guys have SO much chemistry and comraderie together that I had a hard time thinking that they might not have been friends before the film started shooting.
For those of you, like me, who are old enough to remember The A-Team before it went in to syndication, and looked forward to new episodes on Friday nights, I think the story team did an outstanding job of keeping the spirit of the TV show alive while adapting the lives of BA, Face, Hannibal, and Murdock to the modern world. Each member of the A-Team did at least a fair job of impersonating the original portrayal of his character, which in a remake can be dicey stuff.
Those folks working the dialogue get major props for some hysterical one liners delivered by people who all seemed to be working at the top of their game. I don't normally give Jessica Biel much consideration beyond the surface, but the disgust she put into the words, "No, they're trying to fly... the tank" was priceless.
That being said, there were a couple of problems that I noticed. The first was Liam Neeson's accent, which, even when it doesn't scream out a remembrance of the Queen, it doesn't exactly even whisper Uncle Sam, either. Thanks goes to Family Guy for pointing out his horrific American impersonation in the same way Fight Club made it possible for me to actually notice those cigarette burn holes in a movie. I never noticed one before I saw that darn movie, and now I spot EVERY single one.
The other problem was that there appeared to be way too many characters, even those who were only briefly introduced. It allowed for a little too much unintentional foreshadowing on my part.
