Movie Review: “The Losers” not a total loss, but not a winner, either
“The Losers” proves the paradox that it’s possible to enjoy a movie without actually liking it.
This butched-up, big-screen blush on the popular comic book series by writer Andy Diggle and illustrator Jock encompasses everything that’s wrong with big-bang action movies – an adolescent fixation on hyper-violence, a sleazy pathological misogyny, a ridiculous disregard for the simple laws of physics and a lazy reliance of macho clichés and one-dimensional characters.
Yet, that said, it’s undeniably titillating and darkly funny, in a guilty pleasure sort of way.
“The Losers” is directed in a fitting, whiz-bang graphics style by Sylvain White (“Stomp the Yard”), and the whole enterprise feels like a comic book come to garish life on the big screen.
The formulaic story focuses on a muscular Special Forces black ops team that’s dispatched to the Bolivian jungle to deal with some generic, drug-running bad man. The team is comprised of five guys with deadly specialties and roguish nicknames – upright leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), wiseguy Jenson (Chris Evans), knife-fetishist Roque (Idris Elba), wheelman Pooch (Columbus Short) and sniper Cougar (Oscar Jaenada).
When their illegal covert mission goes terribly wrong, the “Losers” find themselves presumed dead and living on the lam, banana-republic style. Turns out they’ve been double-crossed and framed by a rogue CIA madman named Max (Jason Patric, who with tongue firmly in cheek seems to be channeling Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil).
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