HOW TO KILL THE A-TEAM IN ONE EASY LESSON

It's been a fait accompli for some time that the TV series The A-Team would make it to the big screen. Some of the episodes of the series were mind-numbingly horrible, but the basic premise was fun and the casting was spot-on perfect.

Well, they could bring George Peppard back from the dead as a flesh-eating ghoul and let him gnaw off Mary Hart's arm during an interview with Entertainment Tonight and it wouldn't scare me any worse that the thought of The A-Team feature film being "directed" by Joe Carnahan, the "director" behind Smokin' Aces, one of the worst movies I've ever seen. In fact, I think it's the Plan Nine From Outerspace of the "too many assassins with too many guns" genre (If you want to see that genre done right, try Shoot 'Em Up instead).

The fairly great Ridley Scott is producing. Did he actually watch Smokin’ Aces or does he owe Carnahan lots and lots of money? How could the guy who made Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator and Blackhawk Down do this?

Even with the periodically horrible scripts and a string of Love Boat-qualified co-stars, the original cast was darn near perfect. Can you imagine anyone else but Mr. T as B.A. Barachus? George Peppard, Dirk Benedict and Dwight Schultz were likewise, as I said, spot-on. It's not that no one else could ever play these roles, but c'mon -- do you expect them to get this right? Can we not leave well enough alone? As a kid, I loved The A-Team, but do we really need to bring it back? And if we do actually really need to bring it back, why does it need to be "re-imagined" then?

Carnahan did earlier direct a pretty compelling short in Clive Owen BMW series, but that's not exactly a lot to hang our hopes on, is it?

Oh, and would someone please trademark the word "re-imagining" and start charging these bozos for using it? "Re-imaginging" except a simple confession: "We couldn't think of anything new, so we're doing a re-make." For every Battlestar Galactica there are an unending string of franchise-killing failures (The Honeymooners, Car 54, Sgt. Bilko, Starsky & Hutch, etc.).

That's what has been going this morning. Lucky you.