A-Team Review

Holy crap, people. This movie was awesome. It’s the greatest adaptation since ever.

The cast was absolutely stand up perfect. The only thing that wasn’t absolutely perfect on that front was that Liam Neeson as Hannibal wasn’t quite as much of a smart ass as he should have been. The guy they got to play Murdock was absolutely hilarious. The movie won me over early when Murdock grabbed onto the blades of an off-helicopter and spun it around singing “you spin me right round, baby, right round.” Rampage did great as BA. Face was badass without completely removing Face from his wussy nature from the original series.

They start the movie off 8-10 years before the principle plot and show how the A-Team gets together, and it’s absolutely phenomenal. It’s kind of like an Opening Gambit from MacGyver rather than the House, MD opening that the original A-Team series did. It’s fun as hell and develops the characters without muddying up the main plot.

I kept worrying that they were going to do something crappy with the characters, but they didn’t. The movie is set near the theoretical withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, which was an interesting choice but I think ultimately a good one. It allowed us to see that, yes, the A-Team are real soldiers and they really do shoot people, but they are heroes because they avoid it when they can and thus are legitimately liked by the Iraqis.

They have got to make more A-Team movies with this cast.

There were a few parts where the special effects weren’t absolutely perfect, but it’s kind of like in Indiana Jones where you can tell it’s a movie, but it’s not enough to take you out of the never-slowing awesome.

Final note on this movie: I was amused that they brought up the subject of Gandhi, but somewhat less amused that they took a kind of “Well, I’m over that now, back to shooting people” take on it. Gandhi accepted that sometimes violence is a necessity, and the character that was struggling with that problem ran into a situation where Gandhi wouldn’t have disapproved of what the character ended up doing. That’s a perfect reason to continue pacifism, not put it on the top shelf.

My score: 99/100
Guess for other people: 85/100