The Losers (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Run time 97 minutes.

Not for children.

Well, there’s a lot of action in this movie, and the pace is up. The problem is that it is incurably stupid and grossly violent. There is nothing that makes sense.

Always-needing-a-shave Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), always clean-shaven Jensen (Chris Evans), Roque (Idris Elba), and Poosh (Columbus Short) comprise an elite team of special forces in the Boliva jungle on a search and destroy mission. They are double-crossed and spend the rest of the movie trying to get revenge on the bad guy, Max (Jason Patric).

The movie has lots of weaknesses, but the weakest is the performance of Patric. He’s supposed to be hateful and cruel but instead he’s just over-the-top silly. He doesn’t project an ounce of danger for the guy he’s playing. But that could be the fault of director Sylvain White. White shows admirable talent in keeping this thing moving, but Patric’s performance really weakens the film.

Zoë Saldana plays Aisha, a mysterious sexpot, who hooks up with the team, but nobody ever really knows where she’s coming from or which side she’s on. White tries to disguise the lack of content by using camerawork legerdemain with constant ECUs and quick cuts. All the fight scenes are blurred because the camera cuts back and forth so much. Worse is that the fights are idiotic. In one, one of our heroes falls from the entrance to a big jet on the tarmac and he falls from an airplane door from about 30 feet off the ground and lands flat on his

back. Not to worry, he jumps up to fight some more. Another one of our heroes is shot in both legs. Well, he can’t fight too well, but he never shows any pain, just joking like it wasn’t even a scratch.

And, frankly, that’s about half the movie. This is just another low-intellect, overly violent, meaningless movie trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

April 22, 2010