Who would be in your A-Team? (We love it when a plan comes together)

For most children of the 80s, the A-Team is the definition of perfect telly: fun and disposable, a great instant high, much like the Snickers chocolate bars Mr T these days finds himself promoting. The storylines were always beautifully formulaic: our team of former Vietnam vets turned affable mercenaries on the run for a crime they didn't commit are charged with saving a client - very often an attractive young woman - from a menacing, sleazy gang of miscreants who are doing their best to put her out of business/steal her diamond mine/extort money by holding her mother hostage etc.

The show was wonderfully bombastic entertainment that gloried in guns, fast cars and the hilarious antics of former soldiers with mental health issues in the days when no one had yet told me that it wasn't always cool to get excited about that sort of thing.

Hollywood has had its greedy eyes on a big screen adaptation for at least a couple of years now, but I was hoping that the departure of John Singleton, he of Boyz 'N the Hood, and more recently Four Brothers fame, had scuppered what sounds like a pretty dodgy project. That doesn't seem to be the case. According to the trades, Joe Carnahan, the director of excellent cop thriller Narc and sub-Tarantino knock-off Smokin' Aces, is now in the hot seat, while Liam Neeson is set to play Colonel Hannibal Smith, the A-Team's cigar-toting leader portrayed so memorably by George Peppard in the original show.

Let's take these one at a time. Carnahan certainly has the potential to craft something cool and pulpy, though I'm a much bigger fan of his earlier work than his recent efforts to crack the mainstream. Having said that, A-Team cannot work as a super-serious adaptation, even though Singleton was apparently planning one, and Narc's ragged, noirish hyperreal style would not suit at all, much as I love that film's mean depiction of life on the police front line in Detroit. Carnahan is most definitely unproven in this sort of territory.

Moving onto Neeson, this seems a highly odd career choice. It's one thing to take an action role in the recent thriller Taken, which proved one of the biggest hits of the Irish actor's career last year, quite another to dive into cheesy remake territory. And if this is going to a be a "serious" A-Team, rather than a knowingly camp take, it's likely to make the rather rightwing Taken, which featured a plotline involving evil Arabs kidnapping sweet all-American teens and turning them into sex slaves, look like a Ken Loach movie. Under which light the fact that the new film apparently transfers the team to the middle east, standing in for the original show's Vietnam, seems doubly ominous.

So if both actor and director are the wrong choices here, who would make the perfect A-Team? Well, to take the reins, I'd install JJ Abrams, purely because the creator of Lost has proved that he can mine gold from the weakest of seams: his Star Trek reboot perfectly balances action with tongue-in-cheek comedic flare. It even had me feeling nostalgic about Leonard Nimoy, and I was never a fan of the TV show.

For Hannibal, the ideal choice would be George Clooney, provided he could be persuaded not to just deliver a militarised version of Danny Ocean. Face Man? The trades give it to Bradley Cooper, who I've only seen as a passable bezzie mate in the by-the-numbers Jim Carrey comedy Yes Man. I'd be tempted to pull in Owen Wilson, who has the looks and the right comedic touch. BA Baracus is the toughest call because the role requires a certain physicality as well as a personality bigger than Jupiter. Provided he can be persuaded to get on the Weightgain 4,000, I'd cast Craig Robinson of Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Pineapple Express fame. Murdock, well, given that Wilson's already in, perhaps Ben Stiller might fit the role of the deranged pilot.

How about you? Are you bracing yourself or cackling with anticipation? Who would you cast? And most crucially, should this one be played for laughs, or do you want to see A-Team: the action thriller?