The Asshole Team
Just watched the A-Team.
Hollywood has a genre I call "Wacky Action Movie". These are typified by OTT action scenes intercut with "witty" dialogue and edits that cut so quickly you don't actually get to hear what a lot of people are saying. People doing funny voices feature prominently. Women are sexy and get ogled by the blokes.
Con Air is a prime example. The Transformers movies. Armageddon had a lot of that too, but there were far worse things wrong with that movie than just having wacky bits.
Then there's the Fast and the Furious. Scenes take place in hot deserts, often at night. The heat is making everyone sweat which is supposed to make them look sexy. High performance cars everywhere, and lots of boring exposition that's supposed to push the plot along but is tiresome.
So. The A-team, yet another 80s-TV-show-turned-movie, could have gone a few ways:
Transformers - total and utter crap
Wall Street 2 - not out yet but could be good
Miami Vice - not crap as such, but just average, and to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, either be hated or loved, but don't be average because that means no one cares.
It didn't, though. The A-team is really like Con Air and has lots of thing wrong with it:
About 90% of the movie consisted of people doing ridic things in planes, tanks, SUVs, sports cars and motorbikes. This was like Planes, Trains and Automobiles except without Steve Martin or any comedy and where the object is to destroy the plane, train or automobile.
Far too quick and jumpy with the edits, as they go from one one-liner to another, but without leaving room for the movie to breathe so you end up not catching much of what they're saying and tuning lots of it out. When you manage to hear their silly dialogue, it's inane rather than amusing and I don't think I cracked a smile even once. I remember a sheepish grin or two, but these were expressing my feelings on the sheer ridiculousness of the setup and contained no mirth.
The main four actors trying too hard at times. Sharlto Coplen did well as Murdoch, but it just made you realise that Murdoch was always annoying in the first place. He switched between different foreign accents and impersonations so quickly I couldn't identify many of them. BA Baracus never said "I pity the fool" at any stage. I didn't mind Bradley Cooper's Face, but Liam Neeson as Hannibal really sucked - he sounded really amateurish at times delivering his lines and his accent didn't stick. Their classic black GMC armoured van gets smashed only 15 mins in and doesn't make a comeback.
No female characters to speak of. There's one main one, but she doesn't do anything. The two bad guys look similar, which I found confusing, and there's some crap about how one of them double-crosses the other but I really didn't care. In fact all the secondary characters were boring as librarians.
Violence was way overdone. The original show prided itself on being bullet-laden but no one ever gets killed. You'd see the bad guys' car plunge off a cliff and blow up at the bottom, but next thing they're crawling to safety. A million bullets would fly in all directions but no one ever gets shot. This movie had not only lots of murders, but they were frequently totally and utterly OTT with loads of CGI drawn on just to make sure you get the message that these people in their car have quite literally been machine gunned out of existence.
Oh and lots of dodgy CGI was thrown in during a particularly ludicrous scene involving a container freighter.
The only positive things I could say are that some of the original show's patented outlandish stunts were quite entertaining. But even then I found myself shaking my head and raising my eyes to the cinema ceiling rather than accepting it.
There were just too many things wrong with this for me to like it: the tone was off, the acting ropey at times, the attempts at wacky humour annoying, the parts overplayed, the action too violent and reliant on CGI, the secondary characters lifeless.
The Asshole Team, more like. Two thumbs down. :(
Hollywood has a genre I call "Wacky Action Movie". These are typified by OTT action scenes intercut with "witty" dialogue and edits that cut so quickly you don't actually get to hear what a lot of people are saying. People doing funny voices feature prominently. Women are sexy and get ogled by the blokes.
Con Air is a prime example. The Transformers movies. Armageddon had a lot of that too, but there were far worse things wrong with that movie than just having wacky bits.
Then there's the Fast and the Furious. Scenes take place in hot deserts, often at night. The heat is making everyone sweat which is supposed to make them look sexy. High performance cars everywhere, and lots of boring exposition that's supposed to push the plot along but is tiresome.
So. The A-team, yet another 80s-TV-show-turned-movie, could have gone a few ways:
Transformers - total and utter crap
Wall Street 2 - not out yet but could be good
Miami Vice - not crap as such, but just average, and to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, either be hated or loved, but don't be average because that means no one cares.
It didn't, though. The A-team is really like Con Air and has lots of thing wrong with it:
About 90% of the movie consisted of people doing ridic things in planes, tanks, SUVs, sports cars and motorbikes. This was like Planes, Trains and Automobiles except without Steve Martin or any comedy and where the object is to destroy the plane, train or automobile.
Far too quick and jumpy with the edits, as they go from one one-liner to another, but without leaving room for the movie to breathe so you end up not catching much of what they're saying and tuning lots of it out. When you manage to hear their silly dialogue, it's inane rather than amusing and I don't think I cracked a smile even once. I remember a sheepish grin or two, but these were expressing my feelings on the sheer ridiculousness of the setup and contained no mirth.
The main four actors trying too hard at times. Sharlto Coplen did well as Murdoch, but it just made you realise that Murdoch was always annoying in the first place. He switched between different foreign accents and impersonations so quickly I couldn't identify many of them. BA Baracus never said "I pity the fool" at any stage. I didn't mind Bradley Cooper's Face, but Liam Neeson as Hannibal really sucked - he sounded really amateurish at times delivering his lines and his accent didn't stick. Their classic black GMC armoured van gets smashed only 15 mins in and doesn't make a comeback.
No female characters to speak of. There's one main one, but she doesn't do anything. The two bad guys look similar, which I found confusing, and there's some crap about how one of them double-crosses the other but I really didn't care. In fact all the secondary characters were boring as librarians.
Violence was way overdone. The original show prided itself on being bullet-laden but no one ever gets killed. You'd see the bad guys' car plunge off a cliff and blow up at the bottom, but next thing they're crawling to safety. A million bullets would fly in all directions but no one ever gets shot. This movie had not only lots of murders, but they were frequently totally and utterly OTT with loads of CGI drawn on just to make sure you get the message that these people in their car have quite literally been machine gunned out of existence.
Oh and lots of dodgy CGI was thrown in during a particularly ludicrous scene involving a container freighter.
The only positive things I could say are that some of the original show's patented outlandish stunts were quite entertaining. But even then I found myself shaking my head and raising my eyes to the cinema ceiling rather than accepting it.
There were just too many things wrong with this for me to like it: the tone was off, the acting ropey at times, the attempts at wacky humour annoying, the parts overplayed, the action too violent and reliant on CGI, the secondary characters lifeless.
The Asshole Team, more like. Two thumbs down. :(