Dear Hollywood: stop strip-mining my childhood for movie ideas. Watching things that suck for free when you’re 12 is very different from being asked to pay 23.00 plus snacks to watch stupid things when you’re ..older.
The A-Team was a hacky mess of a show – it was basically Scooby Doo with guns. All the episodes were basically the same, just like Scooby Doo. The gang travelled around solving mysteries in a conversion van, just like Scooby Doo. The skinny guy was crazy, just like Scooby Doo. The team never got any better at its work but managed to stumble on the solution to the problem early in act III, just like Scooby Doo.
What saved the A-Team from being a total write-off was the characters. The members of the team were somehow charming, both individually and as a group. B.A.’s relationship with Murdock, for example, was kind of like the relationship between Archie Bunker and Meathead. On the surface, it’s all insults and threats of violence, but you can feel something a little tender underneath.
At least, that’s the way I remember it. I was a tween. It’s possible I’ve become a little more demanding in the intervening decades. My standards may be higher, and that might mean I’m expecting too much from this bad remake of a bad show.
What it seems like to me is a case study in missing the point.
In their haste to one-up the (admittedly cheap and shoddy) action sequences from the original series they gave short shrift to the performances, nearly all of which have an annoying winking quality. Crap like this requires commitment. You can’t be “Halfway Howlin’ Mad Murdoch.” Do or do not do. I don’t want to be in on a joke with Bradley Cooper. Mr Coooper, incidentally, is the worst thing in the movie, hands down. He projects an air of unearned smugness that goes beyond unlikable – he actually invites audience loathing.
Do not bother watching this movie. Also do not re-watch the original series, as I attempted to do to get the bad taste out of my mouth. It does not hold up. I had no discernment at all when I was twelve.
Maybe that’s why I resent lazy movie studios going back and recycling the 80s. Pop culture is made of its moment, and very little of it can survive exhumation and review. I’d much rather remember ALF the way saw it as a callow youth.
Find new writers, with new bad ideas. There have to be plenty of them around.
