The A-Team: Season Three Review Score: 6/10 | Date Posted: February 6th 2006 In: DVD Reviews Starring: George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Mr. T, Dwight Schultz Directed by: Various Released by: Universal The A-Team: Season Three Review by Vince D’Amato | HNR Special Contributor Maybe I’m just tired – but then again, maybe it’s The A-Team that’s tired, but what seemed like an musingly fresh concept of vigilantism-for-hire meets Looney Toons when I reviewed Season Two last year, now just seems re-hashed, re-treaded and re-worn. Not because of other television shows (so I’ll give The A-Team points for that), but only because of itself – and the fact that it never really evolves from its origins (well, not this season, anyway). But from another point of view, I suppose it was blindly giving fans what they wanted to see. But even the cleverly ridiculous antics have now become strictly routine: A-Team gets hired for a job, they have to knock out B.A. (Mr. T) because he can’t fly, the clients can’t pay, the A-team kicks ass for them anyway. They shoot machine guns and never kill anybody, they gat captured halfway through the scenario and wind up in a room/shack/garage that has enough industrial supplies for them to build a tank/machine guns/heavy artillery explosives from scratch, and they save the day, smiling all the way. The only thing different this season is that Dwight Schultz (aka Murdock) seems to be playing his character more on the wrong side of annoying rather than the charming headcase we loved in the last box set. Of course, part of giving the fans what they want is the consistent bevy of beauties that Face (Benedict) is comically trying to seduce and the thousand-plus bullets whizzing through each episode, plus the standard car/van/jeep triple-air-flip stunt. Livening up the proceedings is the barrage of 80’s starlets’ guest-starring spots which include Betsy Russell and Markie Post (both of whom guest-starred in other seasons as different characters) and a young(er) Dennis Franz, who co-stars in the “Beverly Hills Assault” episode. The most memorable episode this season for me was “The Big Squeeze”, where the gang takes over operations at a restaurant as part of a loan-shark sting operation – and by most memorable, I mean it the one episode I remembered clearly from my elementary school years, where The A-Team ruled Tuesday nights. There’s still a fair amount of campy fun to be found in this series, but this season isn’t one of the tops – even though it was (at the time) pretty much the height of the show’s popularity. DVD Bonus Features: No Features, not even cross-over trailers for other TV box sets.

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