Will The A-Team Movie Be Worth Seeing?

Sometime in the early eighties, I was stationed in Germany when the actors portraying the A-Team visited during October Fest. I distinctly remember watching television and seeing thousands of Germans joyfully greeting the actors at the airport – such was the popularity of that show then. I hope that the A-Team still has the following now that it has been made into a motion picture. From a distance, I cannot picture Liam Neeson playing the smart-aleck, cigar-chomping George Peppard, but perhaps, I am in for a surprise. Granted, the television show wasn’t about great acting, but harmless fun of shooting and blowing up stuff... catering to teenage boys.

I wonder who is going to play, Murdock, the crazy chopper Pilot and if he is going to capture Dwight Schultz’s ticks and quirks and benign hatred for BA (Mr. T), which provided much of the humor for the series. Whoever will be playing Mr. T’s character seems to have an easy role: scowling at Murdock… spewing rhymed couplets, beating up bad guys and being deadly afraid of flying. The other role entailed playing the pretty-boy playboy (Dirk Benedict)… leaving Jennifer Biel to provide the eye candy. I am hoping that the action sequences and script humor will compel me to see it… but knowing myself, I’ll probably see it after a recommendation from friends and family.

I am hoping that, as a courtesy, that the producers of the A-Team movie would have some respect and give the surviving members (only Peppard is dead) of the A-Team series a cameo. I always thought that it was rather disrespectful that Tom Cruise did not give the late Peter Graves, who was alive then, and members of the cast of the television series, Mission Impossible, a cameo. Look how classy it was for the producers of Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels to have done the right thing. It used to be the signature thought of George Peppard, saying, “I love it when a plan comes together.”  Let all the elements be there for a hit A-Team movie.