Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 stars50% of a good movie
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 January 2022
There's 50% of a good movie here. In fact, everything is 50% of what it could be, really. The characterisation is 50%. The rambling and overlong story is 50%. The onscreen chemistry is 50%. The action set pieces feel oddly dull and unexciting—50% of what they might be.
The impression I got is that everybody was doing this somewhat begrudgingly to pay off a debt, or something like that. Perhaps they signed up for a different movie idea, and it got switched to this late in the day, so nobody was entirely happy. There's a weird vibe. Nothing's what it should be.
It's the characters and chemistry that are the major failing. Liam Neeson is epically miscast as Hannibal. It's worth mentioning that George Peppard was also miscast in the TV show, all things considered (a charming romantic lead playing a grizzled colonel?). But Peppard in such a role didn't matter because it was just a TV show. A small screen doesn't need filling as much as a big screen does.
And Neeson just fails to fill anything. Not even his trousers, which look like they may fall down at any given moment. He looks weedy. In the same cream shirt as Peppard, he looks like an photocopier repairman who got mixed up with some soliders of fortune (and I suppose they MIGHT need their photocopier fixing on occasion).
Another big issue is that it's impossible to care about the characters.
There is a commendable effort to give BA a back story. But it comes out of nowhere and therefore makes little sense. But this was a move in the right direction. Just like Spock was the more interesting character compared to the heroic Kirk in Star Trek, it's BA in the A-Team who had the most promise for back story (never delivered in the TV show, of course). If I could go back in time, I would tell them to make this movie BA's story arc. Start with him and his origin story. Let him find Hannibal. Give him a struggle to overcome. End with his vindication. That would give this movie some much-needed heart and soul.
And there's also the fact they abandoned most of what made the A-Team so unique. They aren't soldiers of fortune. They don't fight for the cause of others in order to restore justice (spoiler alert: they fight for themselves and to enact revenge).
Although they do make things out of found materials, they never get trapped anywhere and therefore have to use their ingenuity and engineering to get out. I mean, come on! That was the pay dirt each week��the reason why we watched the TV show!
They had one simple task: Take what was great from a TV show, and put it on the big screen. What they did was take nothing but the characters and... Well, make a mess. It could've been so much better.