Hollywood has been repackaging my childhood for years. And frankly, I love it. You can’t beat the onslaught of movies based on comic book heroes and 1980’s franchises. I’m on the edge of my seat for Thundercats, and I’m holding out hope for a Gobots flick. This weekend I had the privilege of seeing The A-Team on the big screen, which, as a child, I watched in syndication on TV. The experience was WONDERFUL.

I loved this movie. It’s an all-out, over-the-top, explosion-fest summer blockbuster. Go, turn your brain off, and enjoy. The rest of the review is riddled with spoilers.

First and foremost, I’d like to offer the words of wisdom a friend gave me upon hearing I would be seeing The A-Team this weekend: “Everything the A-Team did was real.” I, of course, scoffed. But I was wrong. The A-Team is real. The stunts performed in the movie can be substantiated through various historical events and simple research. For me this confirmation, which is detailed below, adds an element to the film that is missing from so many action flicks. The A-Team, through its realism, transcends from top-notch action flick to a one-film cultural renaissance.

Take for example, the flying tank sequence. Basically, our heroic quartet are attempting to escape a sticky situation via hijacked airplane. They hijack a cargo plane on the tarmac. Inside the plane is a tank. Long story short, the cargo plane is shot down. But the gang escapes by airdropping themselves in the tank.

As the tank is plummeting towards terra firma, Hannibal (the leader of the A-Team, played by Liam Neeson) orders his boys to fire the cannon. This seemingly frivolous act is in fact a method of steering. By using the main cannon of the tank to adjust their course the A-Team lands the tank safely in a lake. Had they not fired the cannon all four of them would have been killed when the tank crashed into a mountainside. At first the tactic seems ludicrous. But when you really sit down and think about it, the concept of using a cannon to steer a falling tank has genuine merit. So, I did a little research and a similar event had occurred in real life. 

During the Cold War a group of East German refugees attempted to fly over the Berlin Wall. Of course, they were shot down. However, much like our film heroes, these three men and one woman bailed out of their plane via a small tank and used its main gun to steer over the wall.

The truth goes a little further with regard to the shipping container that the A-Team dumps into a river, only to have it float using airbags. Seriously, car airbags bolted to the side of the container to make it float? To give you the specifics, it was a normal shipping container full of $100 bills and they used four air bags to each of the long sides (a total of eight airbags).

This didn’t happen in the Cold War, however, I did experience something similar personally in the summer of two-thousand-ought-three.  Some friends and I decided to sell novelty jockstraps and pudding cups out of a shipping container. To gain business from foot traffic we positioned ourselves, and the shipping container, on the Market St. bridge overlooking the Schuylkill river. Long story short, we had an altercation and the shipping container was pushed over the side into the river.

Fortunately, one of my business partners was a quirky engineer who was going to use the container in a test after we moved the merchandise. In preparation for the test the engineer had nailed ten airbags to each side of the container. When the container landed in the water the airbags deployed and it floated — barely. While the A-Team’s container was woefully under-airbagged, I feel it was close enough to count for realism.

Finally, there is the stalwart moment towards the climax when the villian fires a hand-held rocket at the hull of a cargo ship — blowing a hole through both sides of the hull. I can see where people would question the realism in this scene. To them I say: ships blow up all the time. Most of the time it occurs when marine life uses a rocket launcher on the hull of a ship.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my well researched and eye-opening look at The A-Team.

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