In “All About Steve” Sandra Bullock is Mary a nerdy cruciverbalist—that’s crosswords constructor to you and me—for a local newspaper in Sacramento. She’s socially awkward, lives at home with her parents, and has an editor who tells her to try and “be normal.” In addition, she’s terminally single and has poor impulse control but, hey, she looks like Sandra Bullock so life isn’t all bad.
Her parents, in a bid to one day have grandchildren, set her up on a blind date with Mark (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman with CCN. She says as long as he isn’t “expressly hideous” she’ll give it a go. Turns out something about Steve brings out the animal in Mary but when she says “I’m going to eat you like a mountain lion” four minutes into their first date he ditches her, saying that he has to leave town for work. She’s smitten—some would say obsessed—and goes off the deep end, handing in a crossword to the paper with the title All About Steve. Sample clue: What do Steve’s lips taste like? Answer: Mint Explosion. She gets fired from her job, which of course, gives her the time to hit the road and follow Steve from town to town as he covers news stories in Texas and Oklahoma. His feelings about her change—he realizes there IS something about Mary—however, when she becomes a news story.
“All About Steve” is kind of a light hearted “Fatal Attraction”—without the boiling rabbit. It’s a screwball comedy where the action is kick started by a misunderstanding. To that list of genres road trip flick and social commentary and you begin to maybe get the idea that this movie covers a lot of ground. Thematically it’s all over the place, but the one element that holds it together is its star Sandra Bullock.
Bullock isn’t playing her usual rom com character here; instead she builds a broad caricature of a chatterbox intellectual, which in the wrong hands could have been really annoying. It’s the kind of role Renee Zellweger would have rendered unwatchable, but Bullock, though sheer charm, pulls it off.
She’s cute. When she tries to slide down a banister, fresh out of the shower, still wrapped in a towel, with predictable results, it’s not a great gag, but she sells it, just like she sells every other silly moment in this kind of inconsequential but entertaining movie.
It’s all a bit harebrained—from the crossword metaphors and the “just accept people for what they are” moral—but a little charm goes a long way and Bullock is nothing if not charming.
The film also takes an unexpected—and not entirely believable—dramatic turn near the end that brings up echoes of Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” and points an accusatory finger at the 24 hour news cycle that turns stories into sensationalism. It’s a bit heavy handed but since the rest of the film is feather light it balances out.
Near the end of “The A-Team,” the big screen adaptation of the inexplicably popular 1980s television show, Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (Liam Neeson) intones through clenched teeth, “Overkill is underrated.” That could be the mantra for the whole movie and not just its bombastic (emphasis there on the “bomb”) climax. Overkill indeed. The explosion budget alone for “The A-Team” could probably fund ten other, less fiery movies.
In an echo of the original series, the movie follows the adventures of the Alpha Team—A-Team for short—four highly trained but unorthodox U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers framed for a crime involving the illegal importation of counterfeiting printer plates. Branded war criminals and sentenced to jail time, they hatch an elaborate escape, involving the CIA and branches of the military. Then, as federal fugitives-turned-mercenaries, seek their revenge on the men responsible for their imprisonment. Cue the explosions.
“The A-Team” is a testosterone fest that can’t even be neutralized by the presence of the comely Jessica Biel. It is about boys and their toys—which in this case happen to be rocket launchers, motorcycles and Mohawk haircuts. It’s the first real action movie of the summer. Notice I didn’t say first great action film of the summer. It’s not great, but it is a fun summer popcorn flick jam packed with the kind of pedal to the metal action that makes guys go “Whoa!” every time something blows up in an extravagant mushroom cloud of flame and smoke.
The action sequences are rather spectacular. In one crazy scene the team “flies” a tank through the air. It’s obviously a bit of CGI trickery, and as such has less real impact than say the stunts in “The Dark Knight” which were (mostly) done without the aid of computer imagery, but the sheer “wowness” of it all will make you gobble your popcorn a bit faster.
Of course all the action in the world doesn’t mean much if the characters aren’t interesting. Luckily the cast is, well, if not exactly Oscar caliber, enthusiastic in their renderings of the familiar television characters. As “Hannibal” Smith Liam Neeson is slumming it a bit, but is a solid presence and a believable hard man. Bradley Cooper as “Face,” a specialist in that most oxymoronic of military oxymorons—military intelligence—brings the same kind of charm to the movie as he displayed in “The Hangover,” and “District 9’s” Sharlto Copley as “Howling Mad” Murdock seems to be having some off the hook fun. Ironically only UFC superstar Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as Bosco B.A. Baracus (the role Mr. T made famous) struggles to be heard above the clatter of the action, but don’t tell him I said that. He’s the only real-life bruiser in the bunch.
“The A-Team” is not just a remake of the television show but also an entertaining love letter to the cartoon violence, the wild action, the one-liners and cardboard characters of guy oriented 80s action movies.
