In short: The A-Team (2010)

I’m not sure this actually needs to be said, but Joe Carnahan is a weird director. Extremely talented and an able to turn his not inconsiderable budgets into true crowd pleasers (if for a very specific kind of crowd), most of what he does feels as individual and personal as any auteur-style movie you’d care to mention. Stylistically, he always uses state of the art and budget techniques of the Tony Scott school that’ll make many a critic automatically use the word “edgy”. I’d argue that, when Carnahan is on, he’s not “edgy” but a filmmaker whose films actually have an edge acquired by an uncommon mix of the ability to direct actors and use sometimes grating film techniques to often very intelligent effect. When he isn’t on, he’s making Boss Level instead of Narc.

This star-studded (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Jessica Biel, Sharlto Copley and Patrick Wilson are certainly quite the 2010 cast list, and would still get quite a few behinds in seats ten years later) variation and prequel to many a nerd’s (including this writer’s) foundational action TV show is somewhere between the two. For my taste, the film’s at its best when it provides its cast with opportunities to play their characters outrageously larger than life or when it comes up with the silliest possible set-ups for action sequences (the thing with the flying tank wouldn’t cut realism muster in a Fast & Furious movie even today). It falters, whenever it tries to hitch the bigness or the silliness to moments of more traditional, semi-naturalistic character work, never really managing to connect the two modes properly. Which is a bit strange, since connecting the outrageous with proper, believable and serious character moments is often one of Carnahan’s biggest strengths.

Conceptually, The A-Team suffers a bit from its apparently unquenchable need to turn the strange innocence of the original series cynically violent. So this movie adaptation of a series where nobody ever died from being shot at with automatic weapons has a body count too large to calculate; in an even shittier move, it also feels the need to treat non-violence as something bad in a man that needs to be gotten rid of and disposed of while the score shits out triumphant music, turning the fun pretend violence surrounding it moment pretty sour for this viewer, and really not helping the film as a whole with its tonal difficulties.