The A Team

I saw the A Team this week, There is very little in the movie that will take you by surprise or involve actual thinking but then, this is the A Team, so what do you expect.

The film has a great many similarities to the Losers I saw two months ago (As I knew it would do.) the film includes some back story of how the team got together and focuses on the actual crime they were wrongly convicted of.

The main characters were all very competent in taking on roles that are so well known it is impossible not to draw comparisons, Individually they were not quite as strong as the original actors in the parts however as a team they clicked very well, Face was probably the best change as the original Faceman Peckman was always very stylish but it was hard to imagine anyone staying that pretty in a war zone. Bradley Cooper however is believable as both the "pretty" one and an American ranger, and whilst Liam Neeson is very good as Hannibal he lacks some of Peck's original charm.

The film itself had several points that demand the utter suspense in all realism, but again it is the A Team, although the ending can have no excuse for the atrocious CGI that makes up the final scene.

So in summery, If you need something to watch, if nothing else is showing, and if you can find it playing, then maybe you can buy a ticket for ... The A Team ... de de de, da da da etc...

The A Team are The Losers

Returned to cinema last night for the first time in what seemed like a long time but was probably only two weeks. I saw The Losers, now if I didn't know that A) The A-Team was American and B) The A-Team movie was due for release soon, I would have assumed that they had decided to make an American version of the A-Team so I was not particularly interested in going and seeing it as I would have preferred to wait for the real thing next month.

It is based on the Comic series of the same name, which I have ta admit I have never read as when it comes to Comics I have a Transformers Speciality, but this is obviously part of the trend of Comic - Screen adaptations that has been such a feature of cinema in recent years.

All in all however it was a good film, and a lot more enjoyable than I had imagined, the similarities with the A-Team were unavoidable, With the Comedy Character, The Tough Black Guy, The Attractive Player and the Older commander, not to mention the fact that they were framed for a crime they didn't commit and were trying to clear their name. This was however a slightly gritter version of the A-Team although there was the common theme that the Good Guys could hit fully armoured soldiers to take them out from 200 yards whilst running, but the bad guys could not hit one of them standing ten foot away with a target painted on their chests. (An exaggeration I grant you but I am sure you get my drift.)

Anyway, I would recommend this film as a good bit of shoot 'em up fun, the action is fast paced enough that you don't have to worry about anything as complicated as thinking, and therefore you don't always see the twists coming (there aren't many) as you haven't had time to think. The camera shots and quick/slow motion cutting can get you quite disorientated but that is the main draw back.

And it does give a new reality to the phrase Women and Children first.