There comes a point in the new A-Team movie when, if youâve ever played Modern Warfare, youâll sit back in your chair a little and think âman, Iâve seen this somewhere beforeâ.
https://lastchance.cc/the-a-team-movie-review-i-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-to-5560544%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
[This isnât a massive spoiler, but if you like your movies 100% fresh, donât read any further]
It comes at around, oh, ninety minutes into the movie, when the A-Team are in a farmhouse in Germany. The bad guys know theyâre there and are trying to kill them. To do this, they send in an AC-130 Hercules.
Now, anyone whoâs played Call of Duty 4 will remember the sequence where youâre blowing people to pieces from the sterile surrounds of an AC-130. Itâs the highlight of the game.
Well, this happens in the movie. As the Hercules descends towards the farmhouse, it opens up with its cannon, blowing it to pieces. And all the while a bad guy is watching this on a monitor, while inside a car, miles away.
The footage heâs seeing on a monitor is black and white, with a white cursor, just like the real thing (and the Modern Warfare level). As youâre about to write that off as a case of having played too many games and not watched enough news, the farmhouse explodes, and the bad guys shouts âWHOAH, ITâS JUST LIKE CALL OF DUTY!â.
What struck me about this line wasnât just how awkward it felt, but how Idâ never heard anything like it. Movies have referenced games before, but usually in terms of characters, or other well-known icons and generalisations. This, though, this is a specific level. The writers figured so many people have played Modern Warfare that they can include a reference about a single, isolated stage in a video game and their audience will know what they mean.
Judging from the chortles, exclamations and stifled laughter all around me in the theatre, it seems they figured correctly.
