If you're a woman who's interested in what being a man is like, as dictated by the pudgiest stereotype of being a man, then blend up The Losers and Jack Daniels, freeze them into ice bullets, and shoot yourself in the throat. But make it out of focus so that it can make the PG-13 rating. This movie was conceived and performed by fans of actions movies, not by true filmmakers. But that's just a conceited opinion. Which is perfect, because this is a movie review. Fuck you, The Losers, for making the most out of a budget, and the least out of my 90 minutes. Ten drinks for every lame Reservoir Dogs slo-walk. My act of contrition was completion. My sin was thinking something genuinely compelling might become of things after the only half-ridiculous opening scene. Follow me into a Bolivian village, where a figuratively animated team of ruggedly familiar special-ops bozos attempt to abort the destruction of said village when it's found out that kids are being held there. The team, ahem, selflessly sends the kids off in a rescue helicopter, but that copter is shot down due to the counter-orders of a throaty unknown named Max. Holy shit, already we've got dead kids in this feature. That doesn't make a good movie necessarily, but it takes some guts, yeah? It adds empathy and weighs things down. But there's something wrong; it all feels like a FOX pilot, or an extended trailer for this very movie.
Meet Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the cardboard captain who only takes the shit so he can throw it right back at you. Roque (Idris Elba) is a straight-up fool for second-guessing the captain as he performs his badassery. Watch out, because Jensen (Chris Evans) will slice you up with his razor wit and pointy hair; he's also wearing sunglasses sometimes, ladies. Pooch (Columbus Short) will gain your trust and your heart because he has a family he really misses. And then there's Cougar (Óscar Jaenada'), the sharpshooting honcho who wins in the realistic category by default because he's given the least amount of lines and screen time.
Because they realize the helicopter attack was meant to take them down, this sausage party has to appear dead to anyone in America as they live their days in Bolivia trying to raise enough money for passports and travel home. Timely assistance arrives in the form of Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who can give them their old lives back if they can give her Max, because as it happens, she knows who and where Max is. Or does she? And does a faux-tawdry relationship develop between Aisha and Clay? Put your money on it.
Max (Jason Patric) is a super-rich villain who deals his blows in snark. His right-hand man/bicep is Wade (Holt McCallany), a thug whose shirt is always too tight. Because there are ships with Jason Patric on them involved in this convoluted plot, I can almost call this a worse action movie than Speed 2: Cruise Control, but I don't know who I'd be insulting.
My heavy eye lids are falling down on my fingers to make them keep on typing. It will do no one justice to try and summarize the rest of the film, even in my normal review ways. The team gets back to the States. They have "explosive" trouble "gunning" for Max. You may overdose on corny "gotcha" dialogue that supposedly happens between guys in high-tension situations. At one point late in the film, Jensen has a gun pointed directly at his crotch, and I think it's because I wished it on Chris Evans for the past decade. Prop bullets do not a wet dream fulfill. This guy is going to ruin comic book movies forever. Mark my (and millions of other intelligent internet haters') words. He delivers words like children read the prizes off of cereal boxes.
For his fifth feature, Sylvain "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer" White has actually produced a snazzy line for his resume. Don't get me wrong, he overdoes absolutely every gimmicky thing he uses, but that's the area I fault him. I credit him, and maybe five percent of the dialogue, for drawing me in enough at times to allow me the room to fall back into my seat pissed off at how over the top the story gets. White had Zack Snyder as the devil on one shoulder, and Three Kings as the angel, but fell short of both. He'll do better, as all of this cast has in the past. The screenwriters had strippers' breasts on their shoulders as they wrote this pumped-up drivel. Maybe one of them read the comic. Maybe they didn't. There's a real special feature on here called "Zoe and The Losers." It's all about Zoe working on the movie. Man, I did not know that dudes would like working on actions scenes with this woman. I didn't know they thought she was sexy before they told me. And I thought it was weird how people said she was nice, too. Somebody transcribe this thing for Wikipedia.
