The Losers seems to be kicking off a summer slate full of Dirty Dozen-esque, crew of guys pulling off a mission films. Between this, The Expendables, and The A-Team there should be enough testosterone to go around for everybody. The question I have is whether or not any of these films will present their cornucopia of carnage in a context that makes me care about their outcomes. To be in full disclosure, I felt going into the, perhaps unwitting, trilogy that Stallone would have the best chance of pulling on my HGH toughened heart strings and getting me emotionally invested in the impending explosions. The Losers, while charming enough to make me chuckle a time or two, has initially proved me right by somehow managing to come off as cold and uninvolving while people are being thrown off buildings and planes are being exploded by flaming motorcycles.
The story drops us off in the middle of the action, where our loveable band of losers are preparing to set up a bombing of a drug factory in the jungles of Bolivia. Leading the crew is Colonel Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who is scruffy faced and sort of vaguely haunted? Chris Evans plays Jensen, the wise cracking tech guy who’s there to lighten the mood and look ridiculously dated with his goatee and frosted tips. The always-delightful Idris Elba plays Roque, a sort of disgruntled rival for the colonel’s authority. Pooch (Columbus Short) should seemingly be here to play the black guy, but we already have Elba’s character? Nice play at complexity, movie! High five! I suppose he’s here to talk about his pregnant wife then; a little bit of audience sympathy to throw on the fire. Óscar Jaenada rounds out the crew as the quiet, mysterious one. He lets his sniper rifle not only do his talking, but also show up as a deus ex machina way out of trouble whenever things look too dire for the other characters. Things are going along swimmingly until they spot a group of innocent children being herded into the compound. What of the impending air strike? Undaunted, our heroes spring into action taking out the drug lords in a more hands on manner and rounding up the kids before they can be incinerated. The next wrinkle happens when the kids take The Losers’ places on the escape chopper and it is shot out of the sky seconds later at the order of some CIA jerk by the name of Max. Thought dead, the crew must now find a way to get back to the US, figure out who this Max character is, and get their revenge! Luckily, a mysterious yet sexy killing machine named Aisha (Zoe Saldana, in her 18th feature role this month) pretty much falls out of the sky and provides them with everything they need to get this accomplished.
Over the course of the film a relationship develops between the Colonel and the Aisha character, and their interactions serve as a nice microcosm of everything that’s bad about the film as a whole. During their initial introduction they engage, without provocation, into a knock down drag out fight that not only would have left any mortal people completely fractured and concussed, but also reduces everything around them to rubble and burns their hotel to the ground. Once the fight is over, with no reason for the character’s to reconcile presented, Aisha tells the Colonel that she has an offer for him. He of course accepts. All realism in action and motivation is completely thrown out the window to shoe horn in a nonsensical fight sequence. The characters at no point act like real people, or even fantasy characters whose motivations you can remotely understand. It went beyond not making any sense, and just flat out made the film look stupid. The characters then go on to sleep with each other a couple scenes later. It’s not bad enough that they’ve gone from enemies, to allies, to lovers all in the span of ten minutes, but suddenly they’re talking about their future together. Wait, what? They’re in love? They’re going to spend the rest of their lives together? They’ve only had like two conversations! How old are they, 16? The film, at least, seems to think that we’re all 16 if we’re supposed to buy into, or become invested in any of this nonsense. And don’t go thinking that the film’s protagonists are the only simpletons inherent to the script. Jason Patrick’s Max is a generic, underdeveloped, cartoon character of a villain. He is evil for the sake of evil, willing to do the most horrible things for ill-defined reasons. He does something with the CIA, but we never learn what. He’s looking for high tech weapons of mass destruction, but we’re never told why. He has access to billions of dollars, but we’re left to wonder how. Patrick plays the character purposefully over the top in a sort of fun way, probably in order to milk some joy out of such a shallow script, but instead of making the poison go down with a bit of sugar his performance ends up over emphasizing how stupid the film really is. It would probably be possible to go all the way down the list from character to character and point out how their motivations are senseless or too simple, but I think I’ll leave it at that. I think you get the point.
Having not really had much experience with stomping yards, I went into this one without having seen any of director Sylvain White’s (Stomp the Yard, duh) previous work. For the sake of yard stomping fanatics everywhere, I hope that he made that film with a different visual approach, because the action sequences in this one are near unwatchable. The post MTV philosophy of presenting on screen action is in full effect here. The camera won’t sit still, swooping in and out of the goings on with frenzied abandon. The image is never still, shaking up and down with the operator’s motions rather than using steady cam. The shots are pulled in too tight, giving us a strong sense of being in the midst of the action, but not letting us actually see what it is we’re being made a part of. The editing is break neck, cutting from shot to shot every two to three seconds without ever letting you linger on, or perhaps enjoy what’s going on. Too many angles are used; the 180-degree rule is broken, destroying any sense of orienting spatial relations. The plot moves so hurriedly, jumping from important development to big shootout with no room to breath, that you lose any real sense of what a timeline of the events might look like. Things are so rushed that none of it can have any meaning. We’re introduced to a child’s teddy bear as an image; twenty seconds later we see it burning in flaming wreckage and we’re supposed to get teary eyed over the concept. Already? I barely had enough time to digest that the bear would be important. I don’t think the camera ever even got a clear shot of the kid’s face before you went using him as bait for tears. How am I supposed to care about any of this? You can’t set something up and pay it off emotionally that quickly. The attempt is lazy and phony. Eventually you’re so swept up in this constant tornado of nonsense that you have no choice but to throw your hands in the air in frustration and let the film take you where it will. Some marketing ploy might describe this type of filmmaking as a “roller coaster ride”; what it really is more closely resembles one part wild goose chase, one part vertigo. The result is a film that ultimately comes off as pointless and unengaging.
The filmmakers are looking for excuses to have things blow up, and don’t seem to really care much if those reasons fall apart under scrutiny. The Losers exists as nothing more than an exhaustive collection of action movie clichés. The first shootout sets the tone early by being set to the Ram Jam song Black Betty. Is there a more overused, unoriginal choice for a high tempo song to score an action sequence in the world? I would be hard pressed to think of one. Everything presented follows a similar path. Not only have you seen it all before, you’ve seen it in exactly the same way, to the letter, multiple times before. There’s a scene where the crew walks towards the camera in dramatic slow motion. It’s about the only scene in the film where the camera stops moving for a second and we’re supposed to drink in how “kick-ass” the whole thing is; but we’ve seen the exact same shot so many times over the last 16 or how ever many years since Reservoir Dogs brought it back, that it falls on it’s face and comes off as painfully lame. Sure, things like Black Betty and slow motion walking are overused for a reason, as they’re familiar and often effective in eliciting a response in a “turn your brain off and have fun” way; but when they’re presented alongside paper thin characterizations and little emphasis on the stakes or consequences of the goings on, then who cares? The end result is never is doubt, the ride to get there is more frustrating that exciting, and the whole endeavor ends rather open-endedly in an attempt at setting up a sequel.
Despite all of this, despite how fundamentally flawed the entire foundation of this film is, there is some entertainment buried away here and there. The banter between the crew works out a lot better than I thought it would. Several of the actors have charm to spare and are able to keep the interactions light hearted and fun. With a better script and with better direction these actors playing these characters could have made for a good action film. Saldana is sizzling here, so the eye candy factor delivers. Morgan has a strong enough presence to anchor a film and I can see him getting more leading man work. Elba I find really engaging, and I hope that he can soon find a film role that lets him match the excellent work that he did on The Wire. Where that role might come from, I’m not sure, but it definitely won’t be in a sequel to The Losers; so I wish this film would have at least had the decency to tie up it’s loose ends and offer a bit of closure, rather than trying to set up for a part 2 that most likely isn’t going to happen.
