The Losers

Hollywood's current craze with comic book films made it inevitable that something this bland and uninspiring would eventually weasel its way into multiplexes. While I respect filmmakers who want to jump-start a franchise to create a story that will hopefully gather a fanbase that will look forward to subsequent sequels, it's hard to respect an attempt to start an original franchise by making a film that has nothing original in it - seems a bit contradictory, doesn't it? What I respect even LESS is the film's "incomplete" ending which is so blatantly obvious in begging for a sequel. This is one instance in which I can say I'm thoroughly glad that the box office returns for a film were bad.

"You liking the angle of the dangle?" Yes, absolutely, but I'm not liking THE LOSERS in the least bit. In fact, getting at least a glimpse of "the dangle" would have made my personal experience of watching THE LOSERS much better (not so for the 14-year-old boys that the film is aimed at, but ah well). The quote I included at the start of this paragraph is one of the few instances of wit that actually works in this film (as opposed to a bunch of other lines that fall horribly flat), and the quote is uttered by Jensen, who is played here by the steaming hot Chris Evans. If you had told me that the ONLY good thing about THE LOSERS would be Evans' performance and line delivery as a computer geek who has trouble talking to girls, I would've never believed it, but that's exactly the case. The sequence in which his character enters a building dressed up as a messenger, then goes up an elevator, and finally delivers a speech about certain "experiments" that the government performed on him is easily the only worthwhile material to be found in the movie, and that's too bad. Fortunately for Evans, as most people know, he's got what will hopefully be MUCH better things coming in the future. Aside from being my personal celebrity crush, I feel that he's been underrated as an actor for years, and I can't wait to see him as Steve Rogers.

The problem with the rest of the cast isn't so much that their performances are bad as it is that the script gives them no room to achieve even a second dimension. This isn't the type of film in which character development matters that much, but you really have a serious problem when two characters could easily be interchanged because you can't really tell their personalities apart. In order to please its target audience, the film features an awkward sex sequence (all PG-13 material) in which we essentially get to see several butt shots of Zoe Saldana. My suggestion for those looking for, um, stimulation is to search for pictures of her online, and for those who actually want to see her talent, look no further than the two amazing films she did last year (AVATAR and STAR TREK), both of which are way too many notches above THE LOSERS. She really has no room here to display any acting prowess.

But the bigger problem with THE LOSERS is that there's really not a single exciting, different or even slightly cool action sequence. All stuff we've seen before, usually done much better. There's a lot of poor editing here, and it'll be obvious even to people who don't know much about editing. The plot takes some ridiculous (yet never surprising) turns, the worst of which features one character committing betrayal, followed by another character who commits betrayal, and then the one who FIRST committed betrayal suddenly shows up on-screen as if everything was easily resolved. But without a doubt, the biggest sticking point is the horribly obvious, sequel-begging conclusion, which is what makes me so glad that there likely won't be one. I watch any movie that Chris Evans is in, but when a movie is this lame, it's easy to wonder whether the money was well spent on the ticket.

As a final note, I also have to point out that even though the majority of the cast is non-white and one of the main actors is Hispanic, the movie has a few subtle (yet easy to spot) lines that convey a clearly derogatory tone towards Hispanic culture complemented with a tone of white American superiority (notice the use of the word "rotting" while the characters are in Bolivia, followed later by the line "Welcome to the land of the living," and the context in which all of this is said). Any doubts I had about giving this a 4 instead of a 3 were quickly dispelled once I remembered that. It's hard to find it shocking, though, considering how brain-dead the film as a whole is. It's the worst I've seen in 2010 so far.

3/10