The A-Team vs The Losers

(M) TCFHE & WHE DVD/BD

A posse of professionally-trained operatives, who take care of delicate security matters the US Administration can’t admit to, are framed. To clear their names, they concoct outrageous schemes, unload countless weapons and take “justice” into their own hands.

Welcome to The A-Team … and The Losers, two 2010 action movies which sound exactly the same yet produce different results.

Based upon the 1980s boys-own-adventure TV series, The A-Team easily takes down The Losers (an adaptation of a graphic novel). While not failing as badly as its name suggests, The Losers fires off the requisite stuff — slo-mo bullet ballets, playful banter, hidden agendas, nasty crackpot villains — without offering much in the way of personality or pizzazz.

That’s where The A-Team comes in. Easily the best action film this year, The A-Team fondly recalls its small-screen origins while relishing its big-screen budget, effects and modern upgrade. Not to mention a sequence involving a tank shooting at jets as it plummets to earth, having been dumped out of a plane. Awesome.

Less awesome is how The A-Team and The Copycats, sorry, The Losers do not, in any way, encourage the turning of other cheeks.

Forgiveness? Are you crazy? Who wants to see a movie about a bunch of hired guns who, after being set-up and imprisoned (The A-Team) or set-up and left for dead (The Losers), find it in their hearts to forgive those who wronged them?

What person would ever be able to demonstrate anything but hatred for those who try to take their liberty or life?

What? Start reading Matthew’s gospel? Why? Is BA Baracus in it?

Ben McEachen