Features > Movie Reviews > The Losers…

Compared to upcoming releases The A-Team and The Expendables, Losers is a cheerfully cheesy mercenary tale, a shoot-em-up that doesn’t take itself too seriously. (To put it mildly.)

A CIA black ops squad, The Losers aren’t as bad as all that: when it comes to blowing up a South American drug lord’s den, they balk at the busload of underage collateral damage he’s brought in. But in saving the kiddies, they seal their own death warrant with the dastardly Max (a very campy Jason Patric), the agency bigwig who calls the shots. Fortunately for them, while Max is powerful and quite certainly insane, he’s not infallible - and so they’re left for dead, stranded in the Jungle, wondering where to go from here.

There are five of them, each with his own skill-set and wardrobe fetish. Clay, is the leader (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, from Watchmen, channeling Powers Boothe channeling Robert Ryan), and he looks good with one shirt-tail hanging out… Jensen (Chris Evans) is tech support and comic relief in a series of nasty T-shirts… Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) is a sniper and never separated from his cowboy hat… Pooch (Columbus Short) is the driver and family man… and Roque (Idris Elba, aka Stringer Bell from The Wire) is second-in-command, a knife expert with a scar down his cheek.

They’re a bit lightweight in the star-power department – Evans is the biggest drawer and the most fun – but fear not, Zoe Saldana from Star Trek and Avatar is waiting in the wings as a seriously sexy (if ridiculously skinny) martial artiste, who hires The Losers to take out Max. 

“How do I know I can trust you?” Clay wants to know.

“Because if I was lying I wouldn’t have used the words ‘suicide mission’,” she very reasonably points out.

Based on Andy Diggle’s Vertigo comic book (itself loosely inspired by the old DC comic), the movie doesn’t really flow, it just spurts out in quick, oily jets.

It’s actually less like a comic book and more like a 90-minute trailer: all the best bits stuck end to end, and the filler condensed into a pithy line or (better yet) a clubby music cue. (The Kills’ “U R A Fever” comes up twice, once for a fight scene, and then again for a sex scene – but there’s no doubt the fight is the turn-on, and it lasts much longer too.)

Locked into the faddish slam-cut videogame look, and filtered (perhaps in deference to a string of Central American locations) in malarial shades of green and yellow, The Losers wants to seem cutting edge, though it clings to a quaint Saturday morning serial black-and-white morality: Max isn’t just down on kids, he plans to get his paws on “next generation” weapons capable of atomizing an entire island. He means to kick-start a war or two, destabilize the Developing World and put the US back on top. Ludicrous!

Directed by Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard), the movie musters a modicum of snap, crackle and pop, but the whole shooting match is delivered in such an assiduously shorthand style that when the smoke clears there’s nothing left to hold on to – not even the questionable promise of a sequel.