The A-Team’s four soldiers drop the word “plan” in 6-megaton clusters. (I lost count somewhere around the point when one smuggled another out of a maximum-security military prison in a tanning booth.) It’s Do we have a plan? this, and This plan better work! that, and I pity the fool who devises a plan that doesn’t end with a mushroom cloud visible from Jupiter. But for all of the time that director and cowriter Joe Carnahan spends orchestrating their next gun powder–dusted scheme to level another city, what makes this update of the ’80s boob-tube boom-a-thon work is his characters’ mutual, palpable bro-love. Call it the Brotherhood of the Exploding Pants.

Only in a movie that tosses off big-nuts shoot-‘em-up sequences like spent shell casings can a scene in which Bradley Cooper fires a machine gun from a tank that’s falling from 30,000 feet play out like a gleefully manic male-bonding moment. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a compliment so much as justification for proclaiming The A-Team everything last summer’s Reagan-era retread, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, tried to be but couldn’t. It’s big, dumb, and borderline crass in its violent excess, but smart enough to know that when your plot serves the action—instead of the other way around—your characters better be fun to watch. (The plot? Eh, it’s just twisty enough to be interesting: The titular foursome, all Army Rangers and Iraqi War vets, are on the lam and out to clear their names—with the help of a possibly shady CIA agent—after being framed for murder by members of a Blackwater-esque military contractor.)

Where G.I Joe relied on a cast only slightly more lively than the plastic action figures that inspired them, this team (Cooper, Liam Neeson, Sharlto Copley, and Quinton Jackson) is a band of commando cut-ups who fire as many witty one-liners as they fire off rounds. It’s more "War is hella fun" than "War is hell," and when the guys in the line of fire seem to be enjoying it this much, it’s hard not to want to strap on a rocket launcher and join the fray.

The A-Team opens in theaters nationwide June 11.