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A-Team Losers

So, this morning – thanks to Netflix – I re-watched Joe Carnahan’s the A-Team, with Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, and – a personal favourite – Jessica Biel. When I was a kid, I watched the TV series all the time. Even then, I recognized the problem of this bad-ass team of virtuous mercenaries who never killed anyone, and I think Joe Carnahan’s approach works a lot better. It’s incredibly entertaining, and everyone in the movie seems to be having a heck of a lot of fun. The chemistry of the leads is fantastic, and even Quinton Jackson – an MMA fighter rather than an actor –acquits himself well. Certainly the weakest link, but I think the stunt casting served the movie in this case.

It seems to me, that this is the A-Team by way of the Andy Diggle and Jock version of the Losers. Now, I remember the whole “planning” part of Hannibal Smith’s character, but frankly, the almost insane plans portrayed in the movie reminds me very much of the Losers, including carrying off a target with a VTOL aircraft (helicopter in the comic, Osprey in the movie). That makes me love the movie even more, given my well-documented adoration of the Losers comic – and lesser adoration of the movie adaptation, which was pretty cool, but didn’t reach the epic awesomeness of the comic series.

This is not to say that the A-Team TV series didn’t influence the Losers at all. The whole “wrongly convicted” is kind of there, and the working in the underground certainly is, though I would imagine the influence would be less overt than it seems to be in the movie.

The problem with inspiration and my creative progress is that right now, at this instant, as I am thinking a lot about the Blighted Earth, I watch something like the A-Team, which leads me to read some of the Losers comic, and now I’d love to inject that absurdist level of heist genre into my special forces post-apoc story.

That’s probably not going to happen, because the dissonance would likely kill the story, but I’m thinking the A-Team/Losers style of action adventure would be awesome for an RPG. I’m playtesting Nefertiti Overdrive right now, but a version of those rules surfaced as Direct Action: Special Operations Force RPG – which I’m highlighting on the SEP website right now – and those rules would probably works really well for this style of game.

Wait, . . . is that yet another project once Nefertiti Overdrive is done?

Maybe. Just maybe.

You can find more information on the A-Team movie here.

You can find more information on the Losers comic here.

You can find more information on Direct Action here.

You can find more information on Nefertiti Overdrive here.