‘A-Team’ is an action-packed tribute

LIHU‘E — The rehash of this ‘80s TV staple has become a sure-fire winner for ticket sales, boasting second place with $26 million for News Corp.’s Fox Film studio.

Why? It’s campy, it’s loud and it’s action-packed. If you’re looking for more depth than that in your film experience, then you might have to wait it out through the summer-blockbuster season.

Banking on the likelihood that anyone who grew up with the series will want to see the movie just out of curiosity, it’s also a perverse win-win for the non-A-Team-fan movie-goer: If it’s great, then said movie-goer gets an enjoyable two hours. If it’s not, there’s the bonus of getting to complain about how Hollywood has ruined yet another childhood memory, the latter of which worked well for “Transformers” and all the ways past nerds got to enumerate what was wrong with “Optimus Prime.”

That said, however, even a fickle, curious audience will likely be pleased by this fast-and-furious adaptation. The TV remake successfully walks the fine line between updating the series, paying homage to whatever campy past it had and making it contemporary and relevant beyond nostalgia with its plotline and special effects.

As far as the first set of upgrades, the cast includes A-minus-list star, former Oscar-nominee Liam Neeson (as Colonel Hannibal Smith) and Hollywood’s next up-and-coming handsome face Bradley Cooper as a tanning-addicted, washboard-abs-boasting Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck.

Casting mixed-martial-arts fighter Quentin “Rampage” Jackson as B.A. Baracus may have been this film’s best homage to its past in referencing that Mr. T was actually a prize-winning amateur boxer who won the Toughman competition. Sharlto Copely is a relatively-unknown cast member who causes laughs as “Howling Mad” Murdoch — arguably the most entertaining of the four.

 As far as other upgrades to “The A-Team” TV-series model, special effects are bigger and louder (of course), with stunts more ridiculous and the storyline (slightly) more complex.

Those upgrades are of course de rigueur in the transitions from small to big screen. What doesn’t usually come across in some adaptations from TV to silver screen is what made the TV series successful in the first place. In this case, despite an entirely different cast, the chemistry is all there, as are the laughs. The only fault is that often, when the chemistry is expressed through dialogue, it’s awkward and unlikely — who has time to carry on a barely-audible conversation while firing various weapons, let alone absorb Hannibal’s intricate and often-makeshift assault plans? Of course, if realism were really an issue here, it would be hard to take any of the storyline to heart. Nowhere does the movie claim “based on a true story,” which is part of the enjoyment.

Those successes, however, are probably the easiest to accomplish for this sort of movie that does fall short in the same places most action films fall short: editing.

As action scenes have become longer and more complex it seems directors have trouble keeping the reins on them and preventing the audience from being able to read the sequences sensibly. In the worst of these cases, the director indulges in unsteady camera work to try and pump up the action. The result is the sequence becomes more confused. The same holds true for “The A-Team.”

This is case in point during a scene in which the team is trying to steal back currency-printing plates from a “black op” contractor nicknamed “Pike” (Brian Bloom) who works for the security firm Black Forest (a fictionalized version of Blackwater).

The scene begins as a fairly readable heist sequence on a high-rise structure, taking place with timing only fictional special-ops forces have and the obligatory destruction and bullet-piercing of buildings and glass windows.

It somehow ends with Baracus taking a non-fatal gunshot wound in a parking garage and Hannibal smashing into Pike with a Mercedes. It’s unclear how they ever got into the garage or how Hannibal got the Mercedes or, of course, how he found them in said parking garage, as there was no sense of continuity.

But perhaps worst of all “The A-Team” does what no action film, much less an ‘80s redux should do: It waxes philosophical. In the case of this movie, it attempts to state Ghandi would have resorted to violence given the right circumstances. Granted it doesn’t attempt to prove this often, but it still puts it out there, muddling and frustrating the plot.

While incarcerated, Baracus becomes a pacifist. While it could be funny that one of pop culture’s icons of campy violence becomes a pacifist, it’s not treated as a joke. The film treats this moment with gravitas and to his credit, Baracus, the MMA fighter, pulls the gravitas off well. But then the film proceeds with Baracus and Hannibal actually trading philosophies from Ghandi on violence and non-violence.

Baracus in the end resorts to what appears in his mind to be merited violence, using Ghandi to espouse that religious transformation and returning to said violence.

What’s mildly annoying if not offensive about this is any serious contemplation on the nature of violence as a means to an end has no place in this movie.

It’s “The A-Team.” Let’s leave Ghandi out of it.

Keep it loud and simple for entertainment’s sake, and the majority of us expecting little more will be amused.