The A Team

I never really cared that much about TV as a kid. Friends of mine can sing the theme tunes to numerous CBBC cartoons and speak of memories of Grange Hill, Byker Grove, Gladiators and countless other standbys of being a child of the 1980s. Obviously I did watch some of these programs, but they were a passing fad for me, something that went in one ear and out of the other as a stop-gap between playing Lego or religiously learning the stations on the London Underground (I'm a geek, I know that already). The first television series I ever felt a real affinity to was the X Files, which wasn't released until I was 14. Looking back I have no real memory of the television shows that undoubtedly permeated my life as a child in the 1980s. As such, I find it difficult to look back upon television in this era with rose-tinted glasses.

The A Team is exactly one of the shows that I don't remember and probably never watched (and even if I had watched I probably wouldn't have cared about it) - and as such the existence of an A Team film holds no particular draw for me over and above the pantheon of other brain-rinsing macguffin-ridden action films. As far as I can tell it was a brainless baddie-of-the-week gunfest in which a band of ne'er-do-wells killed a bunch of faceless goons in the name of 'helping' someone. No one ever was seen getting shot, no one ever bled or got injured and the same old gags and plot devices were wheeled out every single week. Hannibal was the clever one, Face the ladies' man, Murdoch was crazy and BA was tough - and if I had a problem, if I could find them, maybe I could hire: THE A TEAM. 1980s Reaganist US foreign policy summed up in a television show, great.

Notwithstanding this, I shelled out my £5 (Orange Wednesday sadly) and sat through 110 minutes of explosions, muffled dialogue, terrible physics, improbable contraptions, telegraphed plots twists and cheesy one-liners. Yes it made no sense, of course Liam Neeson will have fired his agent as a result and obviously it was completely silly, but I found it all rather enjoyable - mainly because at no point did it ever feel like the people who made the film were expecting anyone to take it slightest bit seriously. As a result every action scene defies the laws of science, every bad guy is a 1 dimensional parody and Face's relationship with every woman on screen ensures a dramatic failure of the Bechdel Test - in short, this is an action film for kids.

Every so often it's nice to leave your brain at the ticket kiosk. If you're happy to do that then A-Team will probably be fairly enjoyable. The bloke sitting behind me who insisting on yelling out approval when a US fighter jet shot down a helicopter at the start certainly seemed to have checked his sanity in at the cinema entrance - the only valid excuse for ever behaving like that is being an American. Thankfully I was in the right kind of mood on Wednesday and so I enjoyed my cinema trip. Rest assured though that The A-Team will figure well outside the realms of film of the year come December.