Fridae

I’ll admit I have a soft spot for The A-Team. It was possibly the most grown-up show I was allowed to watch so near my bedtime, and even if I can’t remember a single episode of the series, I still remember the explosions, the madcap capers, the glorious plans that always got the team captured by the baddies, their escapes, George Peppard’s bandanna, Murdoch’s antics, and BA screaming murder after every plane ride.

All this happens in The A-Team, which finally got produced after more than a decade’s worth of waiting in development. The movie is a fanciful reboot of the A-Team premise, introducing the various members of the A-Team in a series of false starts – which are nonetheless higly entertaining – and when the story proper does begin, it focusses on the famous “crime they didn’t commit” (from the series trademark introduction), setting its timeline in the aftermath of the second Gulf War.

While the creators of the original television series had been inspired by The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven, and Mission Impossible, the A-Team movie takes its conceptual cues from the Ocean’s series. Peppard’s “I love it when a plan comes together!” is clearly the screenwriters’ favourite memory of the series and the movie centres on a series of well-executed heists and set-ups, all executed in a slightly more violent update of the style of the television series. By which I mean villains and minions do die, but they die without any splatter, and preferably off-screen.

By far, the biggest asset of The A-Team is its comic writing, and there is plenty of comedy in the form of one-liners and a list of increasingly improbable plans and counter-plans whose intended effect, I suspect, is to leave a huge grin on your face even as you shake your head disbelievingly at the sheer insanity of it all.

As with the original television series, The A-Team is lightweight fare that’s full of whizz-bang and comedy. And like the original series, there are plotholes everywhere, which we’re supposed to forgive because the product on the whole is so darned enjoyable.