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The A Team

It started well and was a lot of fun till it slowly went downhill in the second half.

Little thing

The first sign of trouble was the scene in the falling tank. It was cool that they snuck into the tank to escape the blown up plane and it was cute that they fired the tank to guide it into the lake. But it was silly (and looked worse FX-wise) when Face stuck his head out of the tank to shoot at the drones. It wasn’t enough that Hannibal said he could breathe at that altitude, the problem is that there was no way he could maintain control (and not be rattled to death/serious injury) from falling at such a speed.

Structure/Plot , Ending

Near the middle of the story or the end of Act II (I forget exactly because that’s when the flick started to meander), the team captured the counterfeiting plates and Morrison was killed. This was a huge mistake because the retrieval of the plates was the line on which everything else was hanging. Act III then felt anti-climactic because the guys were only out to clear their names and get revenge on Lynch. While appropriate, the objective to clear their names should have remained a consequence to finding the plates and the retrieval should have been the purpose of Act III (with or without the Morrison angle).

Ending

Lynch was arrested and then “rescued” by a fellow CIA agent. The A Team was again taken into custody and not given back their lives. While the latter was an inherent part of the story, the former meant that the guys only lost in the movie and it’s awful for a movie to end with the main characters not having gained anything. See Galaxy Quest for a detailed analysis of this vital story element.

Little thing

I didn’t understand why Face came up with the plan for the finale. That could have been a moment of character for Hannibal…allowing Face the opportunity.

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