Well Cast Losers a Mystifying Lost Cause
After their mission in Bolivian jungle goes horribly wrong and leaves 25 children dead thanks to the betrayal of a faceless CIA operative named Max (Jason Patric), an elite Special Forces team fakes their deaths in order to plot their next move in order to clear their once good names of this horrific crime. Led by their stalwart leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), this ragtag group consists of five – Roque (Idris Elba), Jensen (Chris Evans), Pooch (Columbus Short) and Cougar (Óscar Jaenada) – can’t wait to get back home and do just that. But with funds running perilously short their chances of returning to the States get smaller by the day, this once proud unit on the verge of disbanding and going their separate ways.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba and Zoe Saldana in Warner Bros' The Losers
Enter the sexy Aisha (Zoe Saldana). She knows their names, knows their problems and knows their wants and desires are almost a near mirror image of her own. She’ll get them back to the United States and fund their plans to seek retribution against Max, and even though none of them trust the woman they’re more than willing to give her the benefit of the doubt if it means they can finally get their revenge.
Based on the DC Comics/Vertigo series written by Andy Diggle and working from a screenplay by Peter Berg (The Kingdom, Hancock) and James Vanderbelt (Zodiac, The Rundown), director Sylvain White’s (Stomp the Yard) action lark The Losers is certainly one of the year’s best cast motion pictures. Sadly, it’s also one of its most rudimentary and run of the mill, and as perfectly as each actor fits their respective role there’s not a lot of meat on this film’s bones.
The whole thing is as lazily plotted as anything I’ve seen this year, the whole thing revolving around Max’s plot to stage a fake terrorist attack using odd egg-shaped bombs that somehow implode all landscape in their blast radius back to their base ecological shape. Clay and his team don’t so much learn of this plot as much as they bungle their way right into the center of it, stopping the villain’s almost an afterthought in lieu of trying to put him six feet under the ground.
All of this would be just fine if there were some sort of energy or urgency behind all the mayhem. While White stages some good moments (including a great second act heist of an armored car right in the middle of downtown Miami) there is a laziness behind them that I found slightly off-putting. The movie has a thrown together feel making it seem like the cast and crew made it all up right there on the spot, and while certain sequences are admittedly amusing there just aren’t enough of them to warrant the ticket price.
On the plus side, the actors really do come amazingly close to making me think differently about that last sentence. Across the board everyone is just wonderful, Evans, Morgan, Saldana, Short and especially Patric particular standouts. All of them toss of their one liners with amusing aplomb, the latter in particular having such a great time filling his villain’s shoes there just aren’t enough superlatives to do him justice. Max is a riot, and whether having debates about the merits of throwing potential scientific coworker off roofs or calmly executing an employee with balance issues he’s the type of sociopath genre fans just love to hate.
As great as he and the others are, however, there just isn’t enough of interest going on around them to warrant all the fuss. The movie spends so much time running around in circles going nowhere by the time it actually decided to make its way to the climax I couldn’t really have cared less if Clay and company saved the day or not. The whole thing ends up being one of those concepts that sounds great on paper but doesn’t make the translation to the screen in a way that’s remotely satisfying, and while the actors go out of their way to keep things at least semi interesting The Losers is a mystifying lost cause that just left me cold.
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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