The A-Team - Movie Review

"I love it when a plan comes together." Thus speaks Liam Neeson's squinty-eyed, attractively graying Hannibal Smith in "The A-Team," a thoroughly unnecessary but nonetheless satisfying adaptation of the cheeseball 1980s TV series.

Smith's catchphrase has to do with the harebrained scheme Neeson's Army Ranger and his "Alpha Team" routinely choreograph to save whatever day happens to be at hand. But it might as well apply to the movie itself, a project that has clearly been engineered to exploit baby boomers' nostalgia while it frantically courts the gnat-like attention spans of their grandsons.

Thus "The A-Team," which co-stars Bradley Cooper, Quinton Jackson and Sharlto Copley, engages in the same blurry, incoherent close-up action to which young filmgoers have now become accustomed. Plenty of stuff blows up in between wisecracks, and Smith's explanations of what the audience is seeing -- exposition that is badly needed in a film this visually frenetic and breathlessly paced. During a preamble set in the Mexican desert, we meet the guys: the unflappable Smith, who from behind a haze of cigar smoke figures all the angles and inspires doe-like admiration in his men; Face, the blue-eyed ladies' man played by Cooper, whose chief job in the gang seems to be seducing women and assuming an ever-more-cocky air of bluff bravado; Murdock (Copley), the crazy-like-a-fox pilot who flies the dudes to safety in whatever whirlybird is parked nearby; and Bosco "B.A." Baracus, the Mohawked muscleman.