According to my IMDb profile (which I've only just managed to look at and an excellent feature it is too), nearly half the movies I've ever written about have been action flicks. No real surprise there - Hollywood continues to produce action films with startling regularity, each one with bigger explosions and more bullets than the last. But despite the shallowness, I confess that a good action movie can provide all the escapism and entertainment I demand even if my life hasn't been vastly improved as a whole. This movie was another one that piqued my interest with the trailer and like most action movies, it does enough to entertain without really stretching the medium as a whole.
In deepest Bolivia, a CIA Special Forces team are assigned to take out a nasty drug baron but try to abort the air-strike after spotting children being used as human shields. But their superior, a voice on the radio known as Max (Jason Patric), demands the mission be completed. Ignoring orders, they soon find themselves becoming a target for the CIA themselves and they quickly disappear off the radar for a while. So when team leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is contacted by an alluring woman (Zoe Saldana) with a plan to get them home and armed to the teeth for revenge, Clay soon persuades his colleagues Pooch (Columbus Short), Roque (Idris Elba), Cougar (Óscar Jaenada) and Jensen (Chris Evans) to join him. But can she really be trusted as the Losers soon find that Max has bigger fish to fry than a rag-tag bunch of apparently deceased soldiers?
Based on a comic series, "The Losers" feels remarkably like a slightly more humorous take on "Wanted". The film is crammed with slow-mo shots of explosions, gun battles and carnage erupting around the actors as they shoot, blow up and kung-fu-kick their way to the film's (faintly anti-climatic) final sequence. As a result, there isn't a great deal for them to do but Evans and Morgan do well, snapping off wise-cracks amid the chaos. Saldana, however, does her career a power of good - being the perfect blend of sexy chick and bad-ass heroine (which reminds me, I must watch "Columbiana"). The story doesn't really do much besides provide a variety of locales for each action sequence to take place although the stuff about Max's overall plan involving bizarre 'green' bombs is clearly nonsense. But the action is satisfying enough and isn't that what we want from an action pic?
True enough but "The Losers" fails to recognise a basic principal of action movies - context. Take "The Matrix", the spiritual basis for every action movie since (including this one) - would Neo's bullet dodging have meant as much if the story hadn't gripped us from the opening scene, that memorable chase over rooftops between Trinity and Agent Smith? "The Losers" can't make its mind up whether its a revenge story or whether there is a classic 'evil genius' story going on instead and as a result, it isn't as tense as it could have been. The humour also prevents tension building, although it makes the film more entertaining than "Wanted" which took itself way too seriously. Action fans would do well to watch this and personally, I'm looking forward to any sequel although judging by the film's poor box-office performance, that looks unlikely. It's not a bad film but one that just needed a bit less pyrotechnics and a bit more thought to it. Frustrating because I really wanted to like this more than I do.
In deepest Bolivia, a CIA Special Forces team are assigned to take out a nasty drug baron but try to abort the air-strike after spotting children being used as human shields. But their superior, a voice on the radio known as Max (Jason Patric), demands the mission be completed. Ignoring orders, they soon find themselves becoming a target for the CIA themselves and they quickly disappear off the radar for a while. So when team leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is contacted by an alluring woman (Zoe Saldana) with a plan to get them home and armed to the teeth for revenge, Clay soon persuades his colleagues Pooch (Columbus Short), Roque (Idris Elba), Cougar (Óscar Jaenada) and Jensen (Chris Evans) to join him. But can she really be trusted as the Losers soon find that Max has bigger fish to fry than a rag-tag bunch of apparently deceased soldiers?
Based on a comic series, "The Losers" feels remarkably like a slightly more humorous take on "Wanted". The film is crammed with slow-mo shots of explosions, gun battles and carnage erupting around the actors as they shoot, blow up and kung-fu-kick their way to the film's (faintly anti-climatic) final sequence. As a result, there isn't a great deal for them to do but Evans and Morgan do well, snapping off wise-cracks amid the chaos. Saldana, however, does her career a power of good - being the perfect blend of sexy chick and bad-ass heroine (which reminds me, I must watch "Columbiana"). The story doesn't really do much besides provide a variety of locales for each action sequence to take place although the stuff about Max's overall plan involving bizarre 'green' bombs is clearly nonsense. But the action is satisfying enough and isn't that what we want from an action pic?
True enough but "The Losers" fails to recognise a basic principal of action movies - context. Take "The Matrix", the spiritual basis for every action movie since (including this one) - would Neo's bullet dodging have meant as much if the story hadn't gripped us from the opening scene, that memorable chase over rooftops between Trinity and Agent Smith? "The Losers" can't make its mind up whether its a revenge story or whether there is a classic 'evil genius' story going on instead and as a result, it isn't as tense as it could have been. The humour also prevents tension building, although it makes the film more entertaining than "Wanted" which took itself way too seriously. Action fans would do well to watch this and personally, I'm looking forward to any sequel although judging by the film's poor box-office performance, that looks unlikely. It's not a bad film but one that just needed a bit less pyrotechnics and a bit more thought to it. Frustrating because I really wanted to like this more than I do.