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The A-Team: (Alan Silvestri) In yet another example
of a popular television concept that has been hung up for decades in
Hollywood studios because of countless re-writes of its adaptation,
The A-Team finally concluded fifteen years of production delays
with a 2010 release. The concept was a success for NBC when it ran for
five seasons from 1983 to 1986, though the series' cartoonish violence
eventually caused audience interest to wane by its final,
ratings-stricken year. The most enduring aspects of the series were Mr.
T and the 1983 GMC Vandura van that was by default another character.
Perhaps it was a bad omen that neither was able to make a cameo in Joe
Carnahan's adaptation of
The A-Team, the latter a bizarre
misstep. The basic story of the group of elite American commandos is
essentially intact, though the setting of their original "crime they did
not commit" is moved to the Iraq war. They once again bust out of prison
and defy the odds in attempting to prove their innocence and fight for
the cause of good while eluding the U.S. military. Response to the $110
million adaptation hasn't been particularly kind, with mediocre reviews
joined by former cast members who either regretted their cameos in such
a disappointing film or blasted it from afar. One aspect that curiously
didn't carry over well to the film was the silly element of ridiculous
action, a focal point (along with a poorly arranged narrative) of
negative reviews of
The A-Team. Seeing composer Alan Silvestri
attached to the project was initial reason for optimism from film score
collectors. His career has proven him just as capable of providing smart
workmanlike action scores with interpolations of classic themes as the
likes of John Debney, though the downside of such scores from the two
veterans is a tendency to write music that is functional but anonymous.
In the case of
The A-Team, the question is whether Silvestri
would return to his
The Mummy Returns and
Van Helsing form
or would regurgitate the conservatively generic tone of
G.I. Joe: The
Rise of Cobra, a score from 2009 that didn't meet the expectations
of many of the composer's collectors. Unfortunately,
The A-Team
resides closer to the territory of
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
than anything else in his career (with the exception of, perhaps,
Eraser), serving as an extension of the prior score's merging of
techno-savvy personally and orchestral mayhem. It's hard to fault this
music, but it leaves you with no lasting memory even after its extremely
long album has concluded.
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Of primary concern to enthusiasts of the original show
will likely be the employment of Mike Post and Pete Carpenter's catchy
theme tune, which is indeed resurrected by Silvestri. Its adaptation
into even a fuller orchestral environment is specifically credited in
the opening and closing tracks on the album, including a brief
performance of the famous opening drums and a snippet of the theme in
"Somewhere in Mexico" and a full treatment in the latter half of "I Love
It When a Plan Comes Together." What that official credit doesn't entail
is the employment of the theme in fragments throughout the rest of
score; in fact, there are influences of that original theme in the
majority of action pieces in
The A-Team, adapted by Silvestri
into one of his two main themes for the group. The latter half of "The
Plan" is a good example of the original theme's percussive stance and
general brass progressions influencing a revised action theme. A bit
more disheartening is Silvestri's secondary, melodramatic theme for the
film, a weighty, harmonically pleasing expression of defiant melancholy
from the end of "Court Martial" to the opening of "I Love It When a Plan
Comes Together." This idea is unfortunately too close to the
ridiculously simplistic
Tranformers mentality to handle without
forgiving it in the context of the juvenile demeanor of the film. As for
the straight forward action material, Silvestri concentrates the most
engaging music in the scenes immediately following the escape of the
team and their congealing as a group of badasses on the run. The pair of
"Putting the Team Back Together" and "Flying a Tank" owe a bit to John
Powell and David Arnold in their employment of aggressive ostinatos and
electronic loops, respectively. By the two cues for the final
confrontation ("The Docks"), the score has dissolved into a series of
simplistic action mechanisms and rowdy percussive outbursts accompanied
by muscular horn lines at times. The balance between orchestra, electric
guitar, and synthesizer has reached a point where the "coolness factor"
of that combined sound no longer carries the weight that it once did in
Silvestri's
Eraser, and the disconnected motifs that roll along
without further development in this score continue to rely upon the tone
of the performance at a time when more structural cohesion is necessary
to distinguish the overall work. Instead, you end up grasping at the
snare rips and brass snippets of the original series theme, a futile
task on album given that the product of 72 minutes is simply way too
long of a presentation to sustain interest. Perhaps it's no surprise
that the ultimate highlight of the album is its last two minutes. If
only Silvestri's approach had been as enthusiastically memorable, then
perhaps a plan for the score truly would have come together.
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| Bias Check: | For Alan Silvestri reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.34 (in 32 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.27
(in 30,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information
about the score or film.
