Four Army Rangers are framed and stripped of their ranks, but that won't stop them from tracking down the real culprits and clearing their names.

ACTION

The A-Team (2010)

Directed by Joe Carnahan

Written by Joe Carnahan, Brian Bloom, Skip Woods

Starring Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, Sharlto Copley, Jessica Biel, Patrick Wilson

​Based on the 1983-1987 TV series

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Connor Eyzaguirre

December 13, 2022

6/10

Hollywood will forever be content to beat the dead horse that is 20th century television so long as it keeps spitting out cold hard cash. There've been some surprisingly good movies made from old shows: Charlie's Angels, 21 Jump Street, 2009's Star Trek. Most of them are modest box office successes or hard failures, and rarely escape the conversation that they started back around their release dates. Such is the fate with The A-Team, a film that's more competently made than other, similar films (I credit that to director Joe Carnahan), but is still not really up to par.

I never watched the show, so I can't compare the two. I do think the four actors who play our leads (Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson, and Sharlto Copley) are all very well-cast and have decent chemistry amongst one another. But then things get painfully generic as I expected they would. The plot is so "early 2000s espionage thriller" like Swordfish or The Recruit. There's no suspense because oftentimes, we have no idea what the hell anyone is talking about. Military jargon is not entertaining. All the film's big twists are predictable, from the "not really dead" twist to the "actually the bad guy" twist. This thing is loaded with cliches.

If it wasn't for our four leads, this thing would be semi-unwatchable. But honestly, they do such a great job performing as a believable unit that they kept my interest the whole time, particularly Sharlto Copley as Murdock. Clearly, this was intended to spawn a Mission Impossible-style franchise, but the numbers weren't great and interest waned very quickly. Now it's just this minor action flick from 2010 that nobody really talks about anymore.