Following on from the debut of “The Expendables” trailer yesterday, Apple have put up full trailers for two of the summer’s big action movies. We’ve already caught glimpses of both Philip Noyce’s spy thriller “Salt” and Joe Carnahan’s big-budget version of “The A-Team,” but we’ve now got far more substantial looks at both films.
The previous “Salt” trailer actually did a rather better job at setting up the film’s premise — of a CIA agent who goes on the run when a defector accuses her of being a Russian spy who’s plotting to kill the president. The new, longer version focuses on the film’s action beats, as well as giving us more of the other characters; Chiwetel Ejiofor again taking work well below his talents in the Tommy Lee Jones role of the agent tracking Salt, and Liev Schreiber as Salt’s colleague, who believes she’s innocent but, let’s face it, it’s Liev Schreiber, so he will probably turn out to be the bad guy.
Despite the appealing cast, it all looks deeply, deeply generic — it might pass a couple of hours quite happily, but you won’t remember a thing about it the next day. Director Philip Noyce is usually a safe pair of hands though, so hopefully between his direction, and the promised twists and turns of the script, it’ll prove to be something a little more interesting.
The full trailer for “The A-Team,” meanwhile, seems to confirm that the Joe Carnahan that made “Narc” was long ago replaced by a pod person whose main influences are Simon West and Dominic Sena. We’ve got no nostalgia for the original TV show, but even objectively this looks pretty awful, rammed with weightless CGI action and forced, clumsy banter. Liam Neeson looks kind of dead inside, Sharlto Copley is visibly struggling with the accent and ‘wacky’ costuming, and MMA fighter Quinton Jackson, as B.A. Baracus, resembles what would happen if you inflated Common with a bicycle pump (although to be fair, his line-readings aren’t as painful as in the previous trailer).
Our favorite moment of the two and a half minutes? When Bradley Cooper gets punched in his smug face. Or at least it would be if he didn’t then look twice as smug afterwards. It doesn’t help that the imminent comic adaptation “The Losers” looks to be a sparkier, fresher take on the exact same premise (not that sparky or fresh, just compared to this…).
“Salt” hits on July 23rd, “The A-Team” on June 11th. Netflix has thousands of films in which nothing blows up, some of which are excellent. Just saying.