REVIEW - The Losers

Betrayed by their government and presumed dead, The Losers drop off the radar to try to escape from their past. But when the opportunity arises to strike back at the man who tried to kill them, they head home to steal back their lives.

Maybe I was foolish to look forward to The Losers. The polished trailer promised slick pyrotechnics and a some action-packed wit, while a browse of issue 1 of Andy Diggle’s comic promised a gritty revenge thriller with a fantastic array of hard-bitten characters.

The film starts well, despite feeling a pointless need to give us comic book panel versions of the leads, as our five man team waits in the jungle, guiding an air-strike in on the camp of an evil drug-lord. The one note code of honour as they break ranks to rescue a bunch of kids was fine, as was the escape through the jungle in a clapped out school bus and the resulting explosion. It was the cloying sentimentality as the kids are led to a rescue chopper that first weakened my resolve, while the event which directly followed shattered it completely with its vulgarity, leaving me reeling for all the wrong reasons.

And that just the first few missteps by the filmmakers. One minute, the leads will be beating the crap out of eachother as a sublimation of camaraderie or sex while the next Jason Patric will be launching people off buildings and shooting them in the face for laughs. The cast are appearing in wildly different films – Idris Elba thinks he’s in a dark drama, Patric’s in a Naked Gun film while Chris Evans is the comic relief in a competent action film. And Jeffrey Dean Morgan, so effective as The Comedian in Watchmen, is still in his trailer learning his lines while watching reruns of his better performance in ‘Greys Anatomy’.

It’s a shame because when The Losers is knee deep in a halfway decent set piece (admittedly all borrowed from the comic) and the ensemble cast are bouncing one-liners off each other it can be a lot of fun. But even then it too often shoots itself in the foot – first by choosing to go the PG-13 route (some violence and bad language would have least given it a little personality) and secondly due to the barely TV-worthy staging. Apart from the haphazard, freeze-frame heavy editing, each encounter is set up with a minimum of style and shoddy effects work, particularly in a last minute plane crash, further lessens the impact. Stomp the Yard director White simply doesn’t have the experience to wrangle this large cast and deliver a flippant actioner at the same time – instead opting to do neither.

The Losers had great potential as an early summer slice of mindless action. The cast is brilliant (though we would have swapped Elba with Morgan), it’s nice to see Saldana has some range and Chris Evans regains his mantle of a budget-range Ryan Reynolds. But Patric’s take on the supposed evil genius Max is insufferable and the film is scrappily directed. Maybe if co-writer Peter Berg had taken the reins we might have had another guilty pleasure like his underrated 2003 effort Welcome to the Jungle.

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