Music video director Sylvain White must have been thrilled to helm a mainstream comic film, after delivering critical disasters like the straight-to-video horror flick I’ll Always Know What you did Last Summer and the dance-themed, battle-driven movie Stomp the Yard. I didn’t anticipate much from this April action release, and I was still disappointed in almost every way. I expected more from Friday Night Lights screenwriter Peter Berg than amateur banalities like “showtime fellas!” The filmic result of DC Comic’s war series is an utter mess – a one-and-a-half hour wild and exhibitionistic music video with a cast lackluster enough to make one reminisce the good old action movie days of the 90’s – when superstar heroes (Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan) weren’t given enough successive lines to ruin the film.
I usually love revenge movies because of the sheer simplicity of the story. Someone wronged you. Now you’re willing to put everything on the line for justice. Here we have a CIA special ops team sent in to the Bolivian backwoods to locate and destroy a drug operation. After the team is attacked and presumed dead, they decide to follow the voice on the (inter)”com” which led to their seeming demise. They escape South America through the help of Aisha (played by Avatar’s Zoe Saldana), a mysterious operative with her own plan. Masquerading as a native prostitute (I’m sure there is an ample supply of good-looking-enough-to-be-a-supermodel hookers roaming the backstreet bars in Bolivia), Aisha happens to know where they can find Max, the group’s enigmatic target on the other end of the “com."
The plot was thick enough with revenge, but it congeals like tar as we discover Max (played to uncanny, comic perfection by Jason Patric) intends to purchase “green” weapons of mass destruction. These smart bombs are described as “pure destruction. No pollution.” Terrorists with a conscience and a reverence for the environment? Absurdity.
This film is unbalanced and out of control in so many ways that it becomes comedy to continue watching. We expect Aisha to hook up with Clay (loser leader Jeffrey Dean Morgan), but when she saunters into his room at night, ready for action and holding a bottle of liquor, it’s more confusing than sexy. There’s been no establishment of a connection between them at all.
What’s even more daunting is the devotion the losers have to Clay. Established in the beginning of the film to be in charge of “operational control,” Clay is the officer in command. I get it. But there’s a nonchalant arrogance Morgan gives his character that seems completely unwarranted by any real talents or leadership. He wears a tuxedo shirt and slacks throughout the film for no reason I could decipher other than a futile attempt to channel George Clooney à la Ocean’s Eleven. Clooney was in a casino in that movie. And he’s Clooney.
The only engaging scenes in The Losers are owed to Patric’s cunning Max. Watch for the chemistry between him and his beefy sidekick Wade (Holt McCallany) as an exasperated Max places three orders for a firing squad. With the exception of this duo’s onscreen chemistry, the end of this film could not come quickly enough for me. With ostentatious shots that simultaneously speed up and slow down while zooming in and pulling out, then turn to comic Lichtenstein within five seconds, the speed of White’s movie alone will make the audience want to throw up his/her popcorn. The urge to regurgitate should only continue with lines like “payback’s a bitch,” and a steady bombardment of ridiculousness that does not stop (before a young Bolivian boy catches a helicopter ride to safety, note Morgan’s affected grin as he hands him a stuffed teddy bear and speaks to him in broken Spanish).
If you’d like to watch a good result of a music video director given reign with a feature film, rent David LaChapelle’s Rize. I understand entrusting an acclaimed video director with a documentary chronicling a dance movement. The only result you’ll get from watching The Losers is nausea. If you must see it, go to a matinee - and save the extra four dollars for Dramamine.
- Hillary Smotherman
