THE LOSERS fails to win my heart

Rating:  (Mediocre)

The Losers is a testosterone-laden "thrill ride" that some moviegoers will get and enjoy. Others will find it somewhat contrived because, well, for a film about a team of exiles presumed dead by the CIA and free to do anything, it unvaryingly sticks to script and plays by the rules. In fact, The Losers is a pretty good template for the comic book action movie. It has everything required of its genre:

• Insane, physics-denying stunts, developments, and explosions
• Super men who can accomplish anything and a super villain
• Stylized editing and cinematography with Matrix slow-mos and quick-cuts
• A hot chick who plays commando with the boys and sleeps with them
• A cool MacGuffin to drive the plot forward
• A slow motion hero shot
• A witty self-referential sense of humor

Unfortunately, there is a downside: while The Losers represents almost every staple of its genre, it isn't the best movie in its class--not by a stretch. It also fails in one key area: its conclusion. The Losers stumbles to conclude its story no less than three times. Ultimately, it ends as a film we'll remember, less for its whole than its few fun, memorable moments. 

Most of those memorable moments revolve around Jensen (Chris Evans). He's the team's hacker and parkour master, but mostly he's just funny and a bit insecure around the ladies. He also wears a new t-shirt in almost every scene, the first of which is bright pink with a flowery "Go Petunias!" on the front. Shocked that anyone would laugh at such a shirt, he exclaims that he's simply supporting his eight-year-old sister's soccer team. What a good brother. If the makers of The Losers were smart, they'd have an online store up to sell these shirts. They don't.

The rest of the team, they're not too important. There's Captain Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Roque (Idris Elba), Pooch (Columbus Short), and Cougar (Óscar Jaenada). One of them is a sniper, one likes to drive, one's the leader, you know, pretty standard stuff. They work together well, but none are particularly interesting.

Aisha (Zoe Saldana) is a mysterious woman. And by mysterious, I mean most guys will have a pant-busting crush on her by the end of the film (if they don't already). She needs The Losers' help, so she poses as a Bolivian prostitute to meet up with Clay and spends hours, perhaps days, watching him. She finally gets his attention and tells him that she has a proposition for him...then the two mindlessly try to kill each other, eventually setting the hotel on fire. What is the reason for this fight? It makes no sense. This pattern continues throughout the film; we never understand her motivations. Regardless of her character's oddities, Zoe Saldana's star, like Chris Evans, continues to rise. The two are going places, even if this film isn't.

These types of movies need a villain. Jason Patric fills the role as Max, an unnecessarily snarkastic evil dude. He's the kind of jerkoff who does cruel things just to prove he's bad. In one scene, he lands his helicopter on a beach and has a servant woman holding a white umbrella over him (it isn't raining). The wind flares up and the woman stumbles a bit. He shoots her dead then jokes about it. It's hard to find good help these days.

Max wants to get a hold of a new sci-fi weapon that demolecularizes entire islands, or something like that. He also likes trekking through locations from GoldenEye (you'll know it when you see it). Clay and his team try to stop Max, as the good guys should. During the first two acts of the film, they do so creatively with fun gadgets and plans. During the last act, they drive up to an army of baddies in a beat-up van and bust out with guns blazing. It's here where The Losers really earn their name. We don't need to see Clay and the gang balls-out, Rambo their way to the finish. That's just lazy. They could do better.

The Losers is a fun and comic-ey styled action movie featuring every element required for a film of its kind. Unfortunately, it fails to define itself as more than a movie following the comic/action template. Many will leave the theater disappointed, and few will have any desire to see The Losers again.