The Losers

The Losers feels dumbed down to appeal to thirteen year old boys instead of fully realizing its potential for greatness. Rather than getting The Dark Knight or Pulp Fiction, the audience is left with G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan stars as Clay - the leader of a CIA black ops team on assignment in Bolivia. However, when the operation goes awry, and the team realizes they were supposed to be left for dead, Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), Roque (Idris Elba), Pooch (Columbus Short), Jensen (Chris Evans) and Clay jump at the opportunity to get revenge on the man who ordered their murder, Max (Jason Patric). They only know his name and voice, so the team warily relies on a well funded and gorgeous woman, Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who offers to help find the dastardly Max, because she also wants him dead.

Can The Losers find Max and get their revenge?

What is Max up to?

Why does Aisha want him dead?

Director Sylvain White and the editing team are so hyped up to employ all of the visual tricks they can imagine and emulate from other movies that they waste the potential for a better, more intriguing film. The team never misses an opportunity to put some sequence in slow motion, freeze frame, go extreme close up on some piece of action, display a scantily clad lady, or put the frame into comic book/graphic novel form, but it's all flash without substance.

With a great cast like this, and characters that jump off the screen, The Losers doesn't take advantage of its biggest strengths. The movie lacks intrigue and storytelling, and stuff blowing up is put in its place. Maybe writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt (based on the graphic novel by Andy Diggle) had all of the good stuff on the page, and it was ignored during the making of the movie, but The Losers needs more layers, more background about the gang, more details about the plot they are trying to foil and more info about the work they have done together to put all of the twists and turns and decisions to stay together into better perspective.

Instead, we get a group of characters with simplistic motivations where grit is glossed over to the point where you have a series of moments rather than a comprehensive, interesting movie. It's a disservice to the cast, which can do so much more.

Patric is super campy as the evil Max, but in the right way. He delivers the right amount of menace and comic relief at every moment in the movie. Morgan and Elba have much more depth than is required for this script, but still make their characters appear to be more than cartoons, while Evans provides plenty of laughs.

The Losers could have been better if someone decided to go for it.

The Losers is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, a scene of sensuality and language.