The A-Team (2010)

In his review of Joe Carnahan's 2010 The A-Team remake, a troubled film nearly 15 years in the making, Roger Ebert writes of his difficulty in sustaining any interest in this, an action movie where the central element -- the action -- is so cartoonish and unpredictable as to leave the film boring and unengaging. Here he strikes upon a problem prevalent in several recent films, and not limited to the action genre.

Take Guy Ritchie's latest effort, the WB revamp of the Sherlock Holmes franchise. Genius though Holmes's detective work may be, we are left unable to follow any of it, because the film has set no sure rules for itself. We have to take everything for granted, including the possibility of Holmes's level of intelligence -- he knew, for instance, that breaking that water pipe would cause the giant saw to stop working simply because he did, and through no clues that the audience is able to follow. Iron Man 2 suffers from a similar fault: its "look! sciencey stuff!" sequences are so pared down to appeal to the lowest possible common denominator audience that they make the premise of the original film seem positively realistic. Even the plotting and dialogue of Transformers felt subtle and nuanced compared to its unintelligible and mildly racist sequel.

The new A-Team falls into the same category, unfortunately: all the humanity is sucked out of a promising remake in favor of loud, dizzying, unfollowable action. As a result, the potentially potent mixture of a great new cast and a healthy respect for the source material feels completely wasted. Indeed, it's hard to think of anyone who could have better reincarnated the A-Team: Liam Neeson as Hannibal Smith leads Bradley Cooper's Face, Sharlto Copley's Murdock, and Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson's B.A. Baracus, all of whom carry on the spirit of the TV show, while also looking remarkably like the actors in the original program. Cameos from the original cast are also sadly bungled, with Dirk Benedict appearing on screen for all of 2 seconds.

If by this point you still care, the plot is a convoluted mess, too. It basically establishes an origin story for the A-Team, an elite group of humorously snarky and impressively apt welders who also happen to be Army rangers. One of them is legally insane, but he's the only pilot they can find, plus he's funny, so it's OK. They meet in Mexico and have a helicopter chase sequence filled with many pithy one-liners. Genesis story over, we are told of their many successful (and presumably humorous and action-packed) missions together, before the film drops us "40 missions later" in Iraq.

There, after a mission gone wrong, the team is set up for a crime they didn't commit by evil "Jersey Shore"-esque commandos who wear matching sunglasses and matching spikey haircuts and matching black polo shirts with popped collars. They promptly escape from maximum security stockades, regroup in scenes you've already seen in the trailer, and attempt to clear their names. Jessica Biel's PG-13 sexiness, senseless action, and obviously impossible stunts that break the laws of physics and reason all follow.

A lackluster score by Alan Silvestri rounds off this disappointing film: apart from the remix of the original TV theme tune, the soundtrack resembles more what would be written for a SyFy original TV-movie, than something created by the man who scored the Back to the Future trilogy.

Nevertheless, you have to give the movie some credit: it fails to be original, while also failing to pay homage to the original, and that's an impressive feat, indeed.

I Am Legend

After a miracle cure for cancer mutates into a deadly rabies-like virus, Robert Neville (Will Smith) stays behind in a quarantined Manhattan, struggling both to find a cure and to survive in vampire central. As The Last Man on Earth (or so say the movie posters), Neville keeps his sanity by watching taped TV, constantly renting movies in an OCD-enhanced alphabetical order, and talking to animals and large dolls. I do all of these things already anyway, so I feel very well-prepared for the impending Vampire Holocaust.

Oops, sorry. I forgot -- we can't call them vampires. Maybe some copyright issue with 30 Days of Night or something. The closest they come to getting a collective name is the "Night Seekers," which sounds, apart from ridiculous, like a paperback by R. L. Stine.

Anyway, Neville roams the impressively rendered abandoned city streets, scrounging for food in scary dark buildings, broadcasting his distress signal on AM stations, walking through a lot of tall grass, and working on his various Apple computers with their "six redundant hard drives." He must be a pretty busy guy, since he found time to make enough money to own an apartment on Washington Square North, become an Army Lieutenant Colonel, study immunology, train to be a survival expert, and still had a few hours left over to somehow spread the deadly virus.

About 33% of this move is flat-out awesome; that accounts for half of the first two acts. The scenes of deserted New York are simply stunning. Long show-off shots of grassy streets -- abandoned Humvees barricading evacuation routes, forgotten Christmas decorations glinting eerily in the summer sun, crickets dominating the silent cityscape -- are the coolest ever put to film.

Add to that source material by Richard Matheson (writer of some of the best Twilight Zone episodes) and some superb acting by Smith, whose portrayal of a man as burnt-out as the cars lining his street dominates the potentially overpowering computer-created scenery and drives the film forward, and you've got one hell of a formula for a successful movie.

Nonetheless, the night-time sequences, and pretty much all of the final act, resemble a jam sandwich dropped into the body cavity during open-heart surgery: a bloody unfortunate mess. The pale, all-CG vamp� Night Seekers are more silly than scary, and their rendering somehow resembles that of cut-scene bad guys from 90s PC shooters. They are about as unrealistic and unneccesary as the wolves from The Day After Tomorrow, and serve much the same purpose: to jump out and scare you without causing any real harm to anyone.

After a tense sequence with infected hounds (who are conveniently allowed out earlier than infected people are, although I'd be more worried about squirrels, personally -- there are a lot more of them, and they are already evil enough), Smith hits an emotional high point that only serves to show how crappy the rest of the movie will be by comparison.

The addition of two new survivors is a pointless move, as one of them does nothing but gets scared and hide, necessitating his rescue. It's a cheap move to motivate a flagging script and, like a jab of adrenaline to the heart of a dead hooker, fails to resuscitate it.

By this point the previously small plot holes are ripped open into gaping bloody wounds by digital fangs. Where did they get all of these shiny Ford trucks, outfitted with winches and brushbars and KC lights? How does Anna drive into and out of Manhattan when all of the bridges and tunnels have been destroyed? Why can't the Infected figure out how to kill deer or work a can-opener, if they can set an elaborate trap? Why can't they just swim off the island? How can they bust through a steel door in 10 seconds but take 10 minutes to break one made of Plexiglass?

I guess none of this really matters. The central message of the film, as painfully apparent as the "butterfly" theme, is delivered via an unnecessary end-credit voice-over: Light Up The Darkness. This is very good advice: the daylight sequences of this movie were so spectacular, and the dark ones with the vampires so sucky, director Francis Lawrence should have just taken the Infected as read and stuck with answering the film's deeper questions, like couldn't Neville have just thrown the damn hand-grenade? How can a Mustang, with a solid rear-axle and no traction control, corner so well? How could Batman and Superman ever have a crossover?

If only they had listened to Bob Marley.