The thing of it is, if you were a fan of the show then you know that the reason you really liked The A-Team wasn’t because it had a gunfight every week, it was because you dug the show’s characters. Mr. T was the perfect B.A. Baracus, a bruiser with a bad attitude that turned into a bowl of quivering jelly every time he had to take an airplane ride. Dwight Schultz was the perfect “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock, the crazy flier of the group and the guy who acted like a real-life Looney Tunes cartoon character come to life. Dirk Benedict was the good-looking Templeton Face, a.k.a. the Faceman, the ladies man, the smooth talker and the ultimate inside man to have in the enemy’s camp. And George Peppard brought a touch of class and tough guy charm as Hannibal Smith, the team’s smart-as-a-whip leader with an unbreakable streak of loyalty to his men and to the average citizens that needed his help. The show wasn’t just about watching The A-Team shoot up the bad guys (but it helped), it was just as much watching Murdock’s nutty antics grind on B.A.’s no-nonsense straight man attitude. It was watching to see if this week’s episode would show Hannibal working another of his odd jobs in-between A-Team missions. It was watching Faceman play with the ladies’ hearts and worrying about getting his expensive suit crumpled during a fistfight.
After 20 years that’s how I remember The A-Team. And wow, I seriously cannot believe I am going to say these words but wow, this A-Team movie screenplay that I’m going to tell you about takes all of those best remembered aspects of the show, scrapes away all the silly stuff, gives the concept a fresh coat of paint to make it contemporary and then proceeds to shove it into overdrive. This is the goddamn A-Team movie that you wanted so badly to see when you were a teenager: R-rated, a little more adult but completely and totally the same A-Team that you loved. And the action stuff? Imagine the old show with a budget of $100 million dollars. Seriously. It’s insane and yet so perfectly movie-level A-Team! I’ll show you what I mean a little later but for now, here’s the set-up:
It’s March 19, 2003 and we’re about sixty minutes away before America invades Iraq. We open on the Iraq/Kuwaiti border where American and British troops are positioned to attack and are waiting out the time before they saddle up and go in. The first five minutes we’re introduced to Lt. Templeton “Face” Peck and shown first-hand why he’s the most charismatic con-artist you’ll ever meet as he and his commanding officer, Colonel Hannibal Smith, play one over on the Brits and fleece them a couple of grand on a bet – and who try to get even a couple of moments later. It’s five minutes where we get to see that these are the same character archetypes from The A-Team show – Hannibal’s sharp mind, his ability to size up any situation and then crack a quip about the moment, Face’s vain but I’m-smarter-than-you-too-and-you-know-it attitude – and it’s like they were picked up from the first season of the show and dropped right into the 21st century. Holy Hannah Montana, could this A-Team movie actually really work?!
A couple of pages later we’re intro’d to Sgt. B.A. Baracus, described as having two percent body fat and zero humor. He’s the personification of the Army’s new soldier: smart, skilled, no-shit attitude and he’ll stand by you through Hell and back. The war is on and Hannibal, Face and B.A. are sent by their Special Forces C.O., a general named Garner, to the Iraq National Museum to help get out the country’s priceless art and historical treasures before the fighting reaches the museum. Special Forces can only afford to send in three men to supervise, the actual removal of the artifacts will be carried out by military contractors called Green Lake Security. They’re led by a guy named Eddie Pike, an ex-Special Forces officer-turned-private security soldier for hire. The artifacts start to be ferried out to the waiting transport when enemy forces arrive at the museum and open fire on Pike and Hannibal’s men. After an insane firefight/chase – and I mean “intense” in the way that the car chase at the end of The Road Warrior was intense—in which B.A. drives the 18-wheeler holding the priceless Iraqi treasures in, through and out of Baghdad, Hannibal and his team think that they’ve saved the day when their back-up arrives. Instead they find that the Iraqi artwork and pieces are gone from the rear of the trailer and, hey, where did that Pike guy go?
Hannibal, B.A. and Face wind up in front of a military court headed by no-nonsense Col. Lynch and charged with trying to steal the Iraqi prized possessions, worth billions on the underground markets of the world. In a twist that I didn’t see coming, Face decides to turn rat on Hannibal and B.A. and lie to get out of serving life in a military prison where his good looks mean that he’ll be a popular girlfriend to the inmate population. He winds up being dishonorably discharged while Hannibal and B.A. get incarcerated in a stockade in Germany. They’re there for a bit with Lynch coming in to press Hannibal to reveal where he “stole” the Iraqi loot. Eventually Hannibal figures out a way to spring B.A. and himself (in a totally brilliant A-Team way, I mean seriously, I would love to spoil how he does it to you but you gotta see it for yourself). Lynch is after them and as they try to get off this Army base B.A. gets a bad cut on his arm, leaving Hannibal with no other choice but to grab a doctor wearing a white coat and bring him along to patch up B.A.’s wound while they try and avoid Lynch’s men. It’s just as the “doctor” is stitching up B.A.’s arm that a nurse runs over and frantically tells her “patient” to come back to the ward…
Meet the A-Team movie’s version of “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock. And now you see why Murdock makes B.A. so crazy.
Long story short: Lynch is after them, Murdock comes along with Hannibal and B.A. because he says he’s a pilot and he has a brilliant idea to get them past guards on the runway side of the base (did you know that the fine white powder from a donut looks like anthrax powder?) They steal a Hercules C-130 transport plane on the Army runway which is loaded with three Abrams heavy tanks and one Blackhawk helicopter. The plane gets airborne – barely – with B.A. rendered unconscious and with a crazy man behind the flight stick. Murdock can’t figure out how to close the rear ramp and Hannibal watches with crazy detachment as one of the Abrams tanks slowly slides out of the rear of the plane and makes an impact crater on the runway behind. Lynch sends up two jets and leaves the communication channel open so that Hannibal can hear him give the order to use lethal force to bring the C-130 down. Then Hannibal orders Murdock to fly into a nearby storm bank…
This next moment is when I knew that the two teams that wrote the script (original draft by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal with revisions by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas) had to have been glued to their TV sets every Tuesday night back when they were kids.
The jets pursue the C-130 into the clouds. Suddenly the radar of one of the jets locks on to an incoming projectile and we find out that Hannibal is chucking out the remaining Abrams tanks out of the rear of the C-130 at his pursuers. The pilot has a second to realize that there is a tank—let me say that again, a tank—headed right at him from out of the clouds before he punches out of his jet which gets wasted a moment later. This is on page 40. We’re one-third of the way through the damn movie and the A-Team is chucking tanks from out of the rear of a plane at jet fighters. It’s official: I’m now in love with this movie.
You don’t need to know the rest of this. Well you do but I can’t bring myself to wreck it: be a virgin and save yourself for the movie. I know that there’s a writers strike going on right now but it doesn’t matter: this script is ready to roll right now. It’s fresh too, turned in to the studio on October 31, 2007, five days before the writers went on strike. All you need is the right director that isn’t going to roll their eyes and the right actors that will see that this is an action movie like the first “Die Hard” was. A New York City cop blows up a downtown L.A. skyscraper to rescue his wife from two dozen terrorists. How crazy does that logline sound? But John McTiernan and Bruce Willis pulled it off because they didn’t play down the material. The A-Team screenplay is exactly the same thing: if the people that make this recognize what makes the story work and don’t dumb it down this could be the best action movie in the year it comes out. I really truly believe that. I know, it’s absolutely crazy, it’s an A-Team movie, but it’s perfect in the way that the new, reimagined Battlestar Galactica is perfect.
OK, a little bit about the rest of the story: the team goes after Face. They find him. They all saddle up to go get Pike and the stolen Iraqi artifacts and clear their names. Maybe Face is playing both sides against each other. Maybe there’s another traitor who Hannibal thinks is his ally. They travel all over the world to Italy, Dubai, back to the Middle East, before the end of the movie. There’s a couple of equally-as-insane operations the team has to do to get the intel they need. B.A. has to fly at least one more time. Faceman has everyone out to kill him including his teammates. Murdock does a few more crazy things. And yeah, we get to hear Hannibal say “I love it when a plan comes together,” as well as the explanation as for why he says it as well as what an “A-Team” really stands for in Army speak.
I love being able to say that this is an awesome script. It can serve as the launching point for a whole A-Team movie franchise. And unlike the TV show, this is definitely a PG-13 movie considering there’s some swearing and deaths. There’s some twists and turns that I haven’t told you about because I want you to experience the joy of seeing them for yourself or hearing the characters say the dialogue – but trust me when I say that when I read B.A.’s sentences, it sounded like the best dialogue that Mr. T got to say on the show. The same goes for the rest of the team. The writers did a great job of capturing the essence of the old series while making them hard-ass soldiers that you wouldn’t want to mess with in today’s world.
This is an A-Team movie that the little kid inside of me wants to see as well as the grown-up. Chucking tanks out of planes. Maaaaan! |
