In Defense of Big, Dumb Action

I was pleasantly surprised walking out of the screening of The A-Team this week. For once, a Summer movie wasn't striving to be a Dark Knight rip-off, a uber-hip RomCom, or a psychologically complex and/or limp slice of sci-fi and/or horror. Instead, Joe Carnahan took the old '80 TV property and infused it with enough brainless spectacle to keep this cynical a-hole happy for 110 minutes (sadly, I missed the cameo-filled stinger at the end). It was refreshing to see a movie that just wanted to "wow" you, to take outsized ideas and elements and see how far you could take them. I'm not saying that all dumb action works - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is still one shitty motion picture - but in comparison to thrillers that take themselves way too seriously, Carnahan's comical chaos was a helluva lotta fun.

In many ways, it reminds me of the Crank films, entities I desperately love though they are clearly crafted by bugfuck film geeks whose synapses have been fried by too many video games and not enough complicated reasoning. With the human gonad Jason Statham as Chev Chelios and more ballsy bombast than a hundred other heroes combined, what we wind up with is pure entertainment - aimed at the pre-adolescent part of your stunted aesthetic - but enjoyable nonetheless. I often balk at people who pass on such easy amusements. Granted, it is like laughing when somebody farts, but it's still funny, no matter the lowness of the brow. Sure, you can pump yourself up as above the frantic quick-cut fray, preferring your stunts on the slow, showboating side, and there is something to be said about using the camera as a recording device instead of an active participant in a particular scene, but if you can pull off the "pow", we should be willing to take it every time.

This was part of the problem with earlier offerings like Iron Man 2 and Prince of Persia. Both were so engrossed in being important and unusual that they forgot to deliver the divine daffiness that makes the genre so pleasurable. We don't remember much about the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles of the Greed Decade except for the goofball catchphrases, post-pummeling one-liners, and of course, the bloodletting itself. For the next few weeks, audiences will indeed be talking about the 3D glasses gag, the mid-air maneuvering of a tank via its turret, and of course the last act cargo ship explosion. Carnahan can be accused of a lot of things, but failing to put the "umph" in what is supposed to be the annual exercise in escapism is not one of them. Call it a guilty pleasure of a flaw in my filmic analysis, but I'm a sucker for big, dumb action. Thankfully, someone this summer is too.