The 'A' Stands for Awesome

I’m pretty sure I think about the A-Team­ movie more than any person alive.

Pictured: A group of A-list actors and Rampage Jackson looking as cool as they ever will.

This movie is a fever dream and I’m not entirely sure if it actually exists or if I just haven’t woken up since 2010. Nobody talks about this movie. If you say to someone, ‘hey do you remember the A-Team movie’ you’ll either get a ‘yeah, I guess that was a movie that existed’ or a ‘what on earth are you talking about.’ This is a movie starring Liam Neeson at the height of his action career. Bradley Cooper at the height of his sex appeal. Sharlto Copley fresh off of District 9. Ridley Scott is a producer on this movie. Jessica Biel and Patrick Wilson play antagonists. Jon Hamm, inexplicably, shows up in this movie, as well as Brian Bloom – one of the bigger names in voice acting – who is also featured as a screenwriter. It featured one of Alan Silvestri’s – you know, the composer of Back to the Future and The Avengers? – craziest scores, possibly ever.

What is this movie. How does this exist.

There is a scene in this movie where the characters break Murdock out of an insane asylum by playing a 3D showing of what has to be… the A-Team movie? And then, with law enforcement in hot pursuit, they steal a C-130 and fight Reaper drones. But the Reapers shoot down their plane – so they escape in a tank with parachutes. And then, when the Reapers shoot down most of their parachutes, the team fires the cannon of the tank to slow down their momentum and fly the tank. And then they crash in a German lake, and drive out in the tank. This is a scene that happens in a movie that actually exists. And perhaps even more surprising than the fact that this scene exists, is that it actually works. This sequence, by all rights, should be an awful muddled mess but it’s awesome. This movie is 119 minutes of this breed of amazing insanity. At one point, the characters do a barrel roll in a helicopter. And all the characters, including the antagonist, take a moment and point out that someone just managed to perform a barrel roll in a helicopter.

Pictured: Bradley Cooper being as awesome as this movie is

It’s entirely possible I dwell on this movie too much. I distinctly remember catching this movie on DVD after it’s release and falling head-over-heels in love with it. I remember a summer where practically every time my friends and I got together we said ‘you know what, we should watch The A-Team again.’ And we did, because this movie rules. This movie is such a love letter to high-octane stupid action films. This movie is everything that The Fast and Furious franchise wishes it was. There are competent, high-addrenaline action moives. Movies that take the action and ground in intense reality and excellent stunts and brilliant cinematography and writing. Movies like Baby Driver, and John Wick. And then there’s The A-Team. I’m not going to pretend this movie is an Oscar-worthy film. This movie is two steps away from being an incomprehensible mess, with an absurdly convoluted plot-line and some fairly busy and heavily-saturated camera work and occasionally dicey CGI. Yet, The A-Team knows exactly what it is, and what it wants to be, and it excels in that category. See, The A-Team has this weird, endearing honesty to it. And every time I come back to this movie, underneath all the spectacle and off-the-wall action, I’m always struck with how genuine it is.

Pictured: the team planning a set-piece as insane as this movie is.

Let’s talk about the main crew. The cast always, always looks like they’re having fun. There’s such clear, evident chemistry between the group. So much of this film is just dedicated to the four of them messing around, and according to Liam Neeson, a lot of this movie is improvised [1]. Which means you have entire montages of just these four actors riffing off of each other and having a good time. It’s electric. You see Rampage Jackson jokingly threaten to break Sharlto Copley’s sock puppet-adorned hand, and you’re there, and you just buy it. It’s one of the most weirdly natural ensembles I’ve seen in an action film. I would pay for a second movie just to put this group in a room together again. And it’s not just our protagonists who are having fun. I honestly can’t think of a movie like this where our antagonists are so just genuinely entertaining? I mean, you have Heath Ledger’s Joker, who’s enrapturing, or a funny villain like Vizzini. But Brian Bloom and Patrick Wilson are entertaining, in the sense that they themselves are being entertained, are just having an honestly good time, and that bleeds into the audience. There’s an entire scene that’s just built on the joke of these guys in the back of a car arguing about gun safety and how to properly threaten a hostage. In the same scene one of the bad guys looks at a video feed of an airstrike and remarks how “this looks just like Call of Duty.” And, somehow, it’s not absurdly stupid. You have these villains who are basically psychotic man-children and it’s amazing. Because everyone in the movie is having a good time – both within the confines of the movie and outside of it. From front-to-back, it’s just so genuinely fun.

I think it’s that genuine quality that makes the action all work, somehow. Because, again, this isn’t The Fast and the Furious or Transformers where Dwayne Johnson can flex out of a cast or Shia LeBeouf can survive insane falls, and everyone is just find with it. Like in the example of the helicopter doing an actual barrel roll, when cool stuff happens, the movie lets it just be cool. The movie doesn’t act like ‘yeah this is perfectly normal,’ everyone involved stops and says ‘that was insane,’ and so the audience, too, is able to stop and say, ‘yeah, wait, that was insane.’ I think in some other movies this could fall into telling and not showing, but here it just strikes me as everyone having a natural reaction to the ridiculous action happening every second. The audience is never really asked to suspend their disbelief because all the characters are right there with them. When the A-Team has to fly a tank, no one shrugs and says some stoney line like ‘yep we do this all the time.’ Rather, everyone involved reacts with somewhere on the range of child-like glee and manic terror. Because, yeah, they’re flying a tank. Everyone is just having honest and authentic fun in the almost-unbelievable ludicrosy of it all, and it allows the audience to join right in. The A-Team never takes it’s insane stakes seriously, and so the audience is never expected to take it overly seriously either.

Pictured: Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper looking as cool as this movie does

Yet, within the insane spectacle, this movie isn’t without pathos. Because even while flying tanks and doing flips in helicopters and performing any other number of insane action set-pieces, the heart and soul of these characters shine through. The main four aren’t just having an irresistibly good time, but they also carry a lot of heart and soul. B.A.’s arc of trying to find himself. Face’s shaky steps up to leadership. Murdock and Hannibal both having to let go of a bit of control and surety. All of them dealing with the betrayal of insitutions and people whom they trusted the most. Now, none of this is perfect. This movie is often muddled, poorly structured, or just simply hard to follow. And yet all these arcs still work, somehow. They’re not the most profound character arcs I’ve seen in an action movie, but they have just enough soul to grab your attention and root for these characters. To take the high-flying spectacle and ground it in some genuine character drama. The A-Team never expects you to believe that it’s characters are superhuman, they all have real fears and weaknesses. Once again, there’s an honesty to this movie. An authenticity of it. It knows exactly what it is: a crazy, high-octane ensemble action piece. It never tries to be more than that, but it does succeed in being deeper than that. Through its genuine approach to its cast and characters, both in the sheer fun that they’re having but also the genuine quality of their struggles, it lodges itself in a unique piece of action cinema. It’s not a Hollywood spectacle, it’s something different entirely.

Liam Neeson tells a story where he takes his mother-in-law Vanessa Redgrave to see this movie and afterwords she states that “I’m a little bit confused but I love every second of it,” and I think that’s the most succinct way I can describe this movie[1]. It’s not a ‘great’ film by a lot of metric. It's got a weird structure, with weird pacing, and features some of the unfortunate machismo that comes with the genre, but I still adore it. I adore it’s genuine approach to it’s characters and it’s action, and how it never shies away from being what it is. I think a lot of modern action flicks could learn a thing or two from the set-pieces in this film. So, yeah, I think way too much about The A-Team. But maybe now, you do too.

[1] http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Film-Review/the-a-team-liam-neeson-interview