Theater Review: The Losers

Before the summer movie season kicks off audiences are treated to a film with a lot of style, action, and a really hot girl with a really big gun.  The Losers is based on the comic book by Vertigo comics, which is a subsidiary company of DC comics.  I have never read The Losers, but thanks to the character breakdowns in this month Wizard magazine I had a little bit of an idea of what I was walking into.  This film has a lot of faces you’ll recognize, even if you can’t remember their names. 

Jeffery Dean Morgan plays Clay, a colonel who leads his team on all kinds of secret and dangerous missions for the CIA.  When they are betrayed by someone named Max the losers are thought dead until they can take their revenge.  Enter Aisha, played by Zoe Saldana.  Aisha gets the losers back into the U.S. and funds their operation to get their lives back and take down Max.  But they’d better hurry because Max, played by Jason Patric, has some special weapons of destruction he can’t wait to set off.

This film is a glorified action movie in every sense of the word.  Of course there are explosions and a lot of gun fire, most of which are done in slow motion.  The thing about slow motion shots is that if there are too many in a film they start to loose their meaning, and I think this film just went a hair over.  Some of the camera movements were also a little too much.  If you get a close up of a fight sequence while they are fighting the audience’s eyes hurt and you can’t tell what you’re looking at.  Didn’t anybody learn anything from Transformers? 

Now that the cons are out of the way I can talk about the pros. This movie is about what I expected as far as it being a guy's movie.  It’s got gun fights, explosions, some badass characters, a sprinkle of comedy, and topped off by a hot chick who is naked throughout half the film.  Not to ruin the ending but I think the film makers are looking for a franchise, which will make three for Zoe Saldana in the past year.  She could only play three characters for the next ten years and be ok.

I enjoyed Jason Patric as the villain who likes to laugh and be goofy.  I think those kinds of villians are much more sinister because they know they are so untouchable they can just laugh things away.  Jeffery Dean Morgan played a great commanding presence as the leader of the group, and Columbus Short is starting to grow on me as an actor who can do some good work.

Of course the main person I payed the most attention to was Chris Evans, and if you don’t know why then you obviously haven’t had a conversation with me in the last month.  Evans goes into his type cast role as the funny man of the group.  He plays the part well, and I never really have any complaints about his performance.  There was even a moment in the film where he sang a Journey song and Lisa leaned into me saying, “That’s what you look like when you sing this song.”  But my favorite part of the entire film had nothing to do with the actual storyline. It was the first shot of the film with Chris Evans doing a voice over as the camera starts off on a white star and blue background.  The camera then zooms out to show the American flag.  I just want to know if director Sylvain White put that shot in before or after Evans got the part of Captain America?

This film doesn’t have a lot of sophistication to it, but it’s got what people love to see at the movies.  I hope they do make a sequel to this film because I’m interested to see where the characters go.  I just might have to track down a few The Losers comics after all.  

Rating:  B-