The Losers

Every comic book and its dog gets optioned for film rights these days, and there's almost an unspoken rule that these properties are inherently awesome and that film versions somehow nearly always get something wrong in their translation. I haven't read the comic of The Losers but I have a feeling that this is a fairly accurate adaptation as it seems to be fairly straight-shooting. It's as if the creative team thought that being faithful to the comic would be enough to ensure some measure of success, but despite how hard The Losers tries to be fun and enegertic, the plot and characters are actually just boring.

How many times have we seen this story recently? A (post)modern hi-tech mercenary group gets sold out by a dirty CIA contractor... they're betrayed and left for dead, and now they have to go off the grid to get the bad guy and prove their innocence. Meanwhile, the bad guy is planning to betray all of America. This plot just as easily describes The A Team and Red (and to a lesser extent, The Expendables) but the difference here is that The Losers doesn't have a gimmick that gives it an edge over other action films.

It looks good and has a comic-y feel to it - like the way the characters talk, the wisecracks, the extreme close-ups on details, hyperbolic elements and snappy editing. It wants to be witty and subversive but it's cliched and lacks star charisma. It's also so iconographically conscious as to be iconographically self-conscious. I am so over the slow motion 'hero' shot where a group of characters walk towards the camera - it's lame, and surely it can't be taken seriously by anyone anymore? Also, the big reveal of the villain is seriously underwhelming, they spend all this time building him up by not showing his face and then... woah, it's Jason Patric! WTF, how's that a big reveal? Do people even know who Jason Patric is anymore?

The McGuffin of the movie, the 'snook', is a cool idea for a megaweapon but we're not even told how it works. Also, the unresolved ending was extremely anoying - The Losers seems to be setting itself up as a franchise but I have my doubts regarding the possibility of a sequel. The whole thing just seemed to be trying too hard and doesn't have any real points of difference that single it out against the slew of contemporary action films that flood the market year after year.

DIRECTOR: Sylvain White
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, based on the comic series The Losers.
KEY ACTORS: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, Chris Evans, Columbus Short, Jason Patric, Holt McCallany

RELATED TEXTS:
- The Losers was a Vertigo comics series that ran from 2003 to 2006. It was a modern reimagining of a WWII comic from the 1970s also called The Losers.
- As mentioned earlier, a lot of this film's elements and plot beats can be experienced in a more entertaining fashion in the films Red, The A Team and The Expendables.
- More group-on-a-mission movies: Mission: Impossible, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes and The Guns of Navarone.