The A Team (12A) * (From Bournemouth Echo)

The A Team (12A) *

11:00am Friday 30th July 2010 in

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THEY might have been jailed for a crime they didn’t commit, but the latest A-Team are far from innocent.

In fact you could say they deserve be thrown in the slammer – along with director Joe Carnahan – for their poor take on an ’80s classic.

Granted it’s easy to look back at the original series through rose-tinted glasses – there were some dire episodes. Yet for all their unrealistic exploits (“we’ve got a set of pipe cleaners and a post-it note, let’s make a sub-machine-gun”) the legendary characters always brought you back. The same, sadly, can’t be said for this B-Team.

Face (Bradley Cooper) could only have been less likeable if he was Jeremy Kyle, while all Hannibal (Liam Neeson) did was talk for two hours about the plan, the plan, the b****y plan.

BA (Quinton Jackson) was nearly as ineffective as his legendary van, which was written off within five minutes, leaving Murdoch (Sharlto Copley) to pick up the pieces and provide most of the intermittent entertainment – his Braveheart impression was hilarious.

Yet, to be fair, they were working with a plot flimsier than wet papier mâché. Set up after successfully recovering some plates in Iraq (which were being used to make billions of fake dollars) our anti-heroes find themselves in maximum-security prison.

With little panache they escape from jail to clear their names and recover the plates... from Frankfurt. Trouble is, BA needs some cajoling – he’s been reading Ghandi, you see, and he’s quit the violence.

What? Quit your jibba jabba fool, you’re supposed to be BA!

Predictably he’s goaded back and in a maelstrom of CGI special effects – flying tanks, plane chases and exploding container ships – they recover the retched plates. But do they clear their names? Do they chuff.

Half-way through the film Hannibal’s commanding officer says: “It’s meaningless, what are you fighting for?” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Showing at the Empire, Odeon and ABC, see film times here