Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
In the first of what promises to be a summer loaded to the gills with testosterone-infused films about groups of gun-toting, muscular men on a mission (THE A-TEAM, THE EXPENDABLES), this week's release THE LOSERS, based on the DC/Vertigo comic book series, has the distinction of being, well, first. While there isn't a particularly original story at play here, and the visual style includes such tried-and-true favorites as a RIGHT STUFF-style slo-mo walking toward the camera, THE LOSERS' scores many points based on the strength of its enjoyable characters...some of them anyway.
You can literally draw a line between the characters that work and the ones that never quite make it past cliché action-movie staples. And team leader Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Clay straddles that line as the man who feels lost when his team is served up like sacrificial lambs after they break mission to save a group of children from a target that's about to be bombed. The man dishing out the orders, the mysterious Max (Jason Patric, who I'll get to in a minute), decides they need to die as a result of their transgression and blows up their extraction helicopter. Lucky for the team, they aren't in the chopper, and for a time, the world believes these guys are dead. The team tries to eek out an existence in Bolivia until they figure out how to return stateside safely. After seeing Morgan absolutely kill playing The Comedian in last year's WATCHMEN, it's tough to see him fall back on all the old tortured tough guy routines for this film. He's unshaven, gruff, and falling for the wrong girl--in this case the film's sole female lead Zoe Saldana (STAR TREK, AVATAR) as Aisha, who has a plan to return the men home as long as they agree to kill Max in a suicide mission financed by her. The men don't trust her, but they also don't have a choice.
From this point forward, the details of the constantly changing mission aren't important. There's a pretty spectacular sequence involving the extraction of an armored car in the middle of some big city's downtown. And there's also a fairly boring final act set on a port filled with storage containers. Double crosses and improvising entries and escapes are all part of process, and much of that feels familiar. So as I indicated earlier, this film lives or dies on the strength of its personality, and THE LOSERS is front-loaded with personality. Morgan isn't wholly successful at creating a character that breaks the mold, although he's a lot more moody than your typical action hero and feels the break from his identity more than the other men, to the point where he asks them to stop calling him Colonel. An actor I like a great deal, Idris Elba, plays Roque, and he's the least interesting character of the bunch. Elba is playing a tough guy without really being one. He's quick to pull out his gun and spout lines about killing, but the threat just never seems credible, which is surprising since he played Stringer Bell on "The Wire," one of the greatest, smartest villains in TV history.
The rest of the team members are a whole lot more fun. The secret star of this movie is Chris Evans as Jensen, who is so comfortable in his masculinity that he sports pink t-shirts and spiky hair without fear of anyone mocking his manhood. He's funny, charming, and has the swagger of a man who might seem more comfortable in a club than a firefight. Evans is worth the price of admission. I'm also quickly becoming a fan of Columbus Short, who has shown both comedic and dramatic fortitude in such films are WHITEOUT, CADILLAC RECORDS, ARMORED, and last week's DEATH AT A FUNEAL. I may not have liked some of these movies, but Short excels in all of them, and as Pooch in THE LOSERS, he seems exceedingly at ease. Short is the real deal, and I expect to be seeing a whole lot of him in the years to come. Óscar Jaenada is an unknown quantity to me as Cougar, the quiet but most dangerous member of the team. Although he's had smaller roles in Soderbergh's CHE and Jim Jarmusch's THE LIMITS OF CONTROL, this is the Spanish actor's highest-profile work in a U.S. production to date, and I thought he was extremely cool and creepy and the baddest bad ass in this movie.
Zoe Saldana certainly looks spectacular and holds her own as a brawler, particularly in her many hand-to-hand combat scenes. I'm just not sure the character is all that interesting, especially when we find out why she's such a mystery. But I'm willing to give her a pass because he wears a lot of skimpy or tight outfits that at least distracted me from just how underwritten Aisha is. Hey, I take my entertainment where I can get it. THE LOSERS' biggest problem is in Patric's Max, a rogue CIA leader bent on supplying weapons to terrorists so they can use them against the United States and thus our government will tighten its grip on the world's security issues. Yeah, okay, that'll happen. Patric plays Max as such a foppish, cartoony bad guy that it's almost impossible to take him seriously. It seems he spent more time picking out his shiny suits than he did concocting his schemes. And his jokes are so lame, I suspect that Jay Leno's monologue writers had something to do with them. On no level does Patric's performance work. I truly wonder if director Sylvian White (STOMP THE YARD) had problems reeling him in. He doesn't sink the movie, but he comes damn close.
THE LOSERS works more often than it doesn't, and for that reason I'm recommending it. It's a tight little package of the movie that has very few wasted scenes and almost never stops moving long enough to take a breath. Punctuated by strong performances by most of the team members, I have to say that I was pulled through some of the plot holes and underwritten characters by the sheer force of some of the actors. With many of this summer's group-of-guys movies, I suspect this will be the primary criteria for judging success or failure. But with THE LOSERS, the actors seize the day, and I had a mostly great time watching this film unfold.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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