Yep, good, thanks Hollywood. That’s another fond childhood memory you’ve comprehensively pissed over.
The new big-screen remake of The A-Team is released in cinemas this week, the latest example of the current Hollywood trend of making films out of things I liked when I was seven. The experience of watching this movie – as with Transformers, The Karate Kid and all the rest – is a dispiriting mix of resentment and betrayal and the knowledge that some central component of who you are has irrevocably and forever been sullied. It’s what I imagine it would feel like to find out your dad was a paedophile.
So, my main memory of the film (and I’m aware this is going to make me sound like a miserable old woman) was how earsplittingly LOUD it was. At several points I had to fight the temptation to simply put my fingers in my ears – opting instead to bang on the projectionists window with a broom handle demanding he “turn that infernal racket down!”
I don’t know if it will be as loud as that in every cinema. They may have just cranked the volume up for the press screening as some kind of pre-emptive strike to stop the critics telling people how shit it is by melting our brains.
In which case, they’ve been at least partially successful. The part of my frontal lobe responsible for remembering convoluted plot details has effectively been destroyed. Despite seeing the film less than a week ago, I have almost no memory of what happens in it. There’s something about a CIA conspiracy, I remember that. And a magic machine that prints money. There’s also quite a good bit where they fly a tank.
Also, although it’s entirely possible I may have just dreamt this, there’s a section of dialogue where Liam Neeson quotes Gandhi (“it’s better to be violent if there’s violence in our hearts”) as a way of reassuring B.A. Baracus that gruesomely snapping the necks of your enemies is morally acceptable. Um, really? I’m not sure that’s quite what Gandhi was getting at with that one was it?
I think you’ll find he’d actually prefer us to shoot them in the face with a bazooka..
(a sort of padded out version of this review was also published in the Sabotage Times)
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