C-
It’s great when young filmmakers want to tip their hat to the classics; it’s terrible when they do so badly. Most of us remember the famous moment in “Casablanca” when Rick’s asked why he came to the place and he replies, “For the waters.” When reminded there are no waters there, he replies simply, “I was misinformed.” In this movie, Clay, the leader of a Special Ops group betrayed by a CIA slimeball, is holed up in a seedy hotel in Bolivia. Asked how he got there, he says “On a cruise ship.” When reminded that Bolivia’s land-locked, he says it was a very special cruise ship. Not quite the same, is it?
That’s about the level of quality one encounters consistently in “The Losers,” an adaptation of a short-run Vertigo DC comic series that ran from 2004 to 2006 and was itself a revamping of an earlier version of the team that ran in “Our Fighting Forces” during the 1970s. In the new incarnation the team is a quintet of hard-nosed daredevil commandos who undertake apparently hopeless operations for the CIA—Colonel Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the team leader; Jensen (Chris Evans), the motormouth jokester; Roque (Idris Alba), the scarred strongman; Pooch (Columbus Short), the ace pilot; and Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), the sharpshooter.
In this opening installment of a presumably hoped-for franchise, the team is assigned to provide visual guidance for an aerial assault on a drug compound in the Bolivian jungle. When they spy a bunch of innocent kids there, however, they attack the place to rescue them, eventually sending them off on their evacuation helicopter. But evil CIA agent Max (Jason Patric) blows up the copter, thinking the team is inside. Mourning the loss of the kids, they go underground, presumed dead but thirsting for revenge.
An opportunity is provided by the mysterious Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who beds Clay and then offers to smuggle them back into the States and bankroll them in an operation to track down and kill Max. The effort involves a string of action set-pieces with plenty of firefights and explosions, some supposedly surprising twists and revelations, a major act of betrayal (the perpetrator will be predictable to readers of the books), and lots of juvenile macho banter, with a big final confrontation centering on foiling Max’s plot to blow up a good deal of Los Angeles using a new kind of device called “snukes,” which demolish stuff in a whirlwind of destruction but don’t involve fallout. His intent is apparently to incite a new wave of retaliation against the terrorists who will be assumed to have been responsible. He’s a crazy patriot, you see.
And craziness is the essence of Patric’s campy, over-the-top performance—the only really enjoyable aspect of the movie—which pegs the CIA madman as a direct descendent of James Bond’s Blofeld, ratcheted up several notches. The other moderately amusing member of the ensemble is Evans, whose manic delivery and scrawny physique are fine here but only point up why he’s exactly the wrong choice to play Steve Rogers.
Otherwise “The Losers” doesn’t have much to offer. The jumpy camerawork (especially irritating in the insanely jerky hand-held prologue), the hyperkinetic editing by David Checel, and the garish look cultivated by production designer Aaron Osborne, art director Erin Cochran and cinematographer Scott Kevan make the movie a chore to watch. Morgan has all the charisma of Steven Seagall, and Saldana, though admittedly easy on the eye, isn’t much else. Elba scowls fine, which is about all he has to do, but Short’s puppy-dog comic turn is tedious—and the coda about his domestic life is lame. And the crude ethic humor surrounding the weapons scientist played by Peter Macdissi is especially noxious.
The title of the picture, of course, itself invites derisive critical comment. But the obvious descent of this dirty half-dozen minus one from an old television series that’s itself the basis for a big summer remake—might instead lead one to comment that “The Losers” is basically a low-rent cousin of “The A-Team”—“The C- Team,” in other words.