Movie Review

The A-Team

My head still hurts. From the hectic opening minutes where director Joe Carnahan shoe-horns in action and character introductions as if he’s composing a movie trailer instead of a film, to the moronically cartoonish characters, to the onslaught of plot-less, joy-less, and thrill-less violence, “The A-Team” is hardly a movie, it’s a disaster of mind-numbing proportions.

What story there is has Hannibal (Liam Neeson) and his team, Face (Bradley Cooper), B.A (Quinton “Rampage” Jackson), and Murdock (Sharlto Copley), being set up for trying to steal Iraqi money plates during the Gulf War. The guys escape from prison and go after the people really responsible for the theft. What follows is another action movie that thinks being loud and dumb is the same as being funny and entertaining.

The women of “Sex and the City 2” got criticized for being feminine bimbos earlier this year and I wonder if the guys from the “A-Team” will catch the same kind of crap for being masculine versions. There doesn’t seem to be a brain among them, but they do have dick-wagging, gun-toting, fist-pumping, cigar-puffing, gruff-speaking over-machismo. If there was meant to be any chemistry between these characters, it was lost on me. They exist only to go from one unbelievable, incomprehensibly fast-paced gun battle, explosion, or heist to the next. I’m not even sure I know the special-op talent of most of them. And if there was supposed to be something between Bradley Cooper’s Face and Jessica Biel’s Agent Charisa Sosa, well then that was even less developed. Some might say it does the cheesy television show justice, but I say we gotta stop doing justice to long-gone television, especially if this is the best we're going to get. “The A-Team” is A-Headache.

Craig's Grade: D

A	10.9%
B	41.8%
C	31.8%
D	15.3%
F	0.3%