Productivity in the Time of Lockdown: 20 Questions
This is probably nerve damage because it turns out that sitting directly on the heating pad seemed to provide me with some relief. I tried to lay down, but how would I have been able to distract myself with 2010's "The Losers", a film that must have thought the moderate success of the R-Rated, Jeffery Dean Morgan starring "Watchmen" could translate into PG-13 gold. Since Morgan is known best for characters whose murders all revolve around pregnancy, the result seems easy to predict.
The Losers (2010)
Colonel Clay is the head of an elite special ops unit that takes on a mission that is way too easy for their skill set. All they had to do was laser tag a drug lord's Bolivian home so that it can be bombed by the air force. It suddenly becomes complicated when they find 25 child drug mules being dropped off at the hacienda, only eight minutes before the air strike. An attempt to abort the mission is made, but instead of your standard higher up responding, a man named Max tells them he knew about the collateral damage in a gloating fashion.
The team goes on and rescues all the kids before the contact. Clay also kills the drug lord but before that, the villain warns him about Max and his intentions. This warning reigns true after the team loads the kids on to their extraction helicopter. A fighter jet shoots the chopper down, killing all on board. Since it was suppose to be our heroes, they determine it is best to throw their dog tags into the wreckage knowing that they will be hunted down otherwise.
Three months later, the team is losing hope that they can ever return to the States. Clay's lieutenant, Rogue, believes that his leader's intention to avenge the deaths and their expulsion is going to keep them where they are. This means he is very skeptical when Clay introduces the team to Aisha, a wanted woman who offers to bankroll a mission to bring Max down. He can be skeptical, but when you have lost everything, you have to take on any gamble. What do you have to lose?
When you start a film with an assault that is reminiscent of the first action sequence in "Predator" and then kill 25 kids, your feature needs to reach for that R-Rating. Instead, "The Losers" is an effort to be an edgy comic book feature through innuendo. Violence and morally flexible heroes are what brought me to the feature, so it is sad to find a bad special effects feature where the heroes will do no wrong.
The direction shows the limitations of this project. Brutal violence is only implied so that mom and pop can bring their kids to it. This does not work because when you see the action that is going to be taken only to pull away while the carnage is delivered, the cold and clever characters are left toothless. If we are watching "The Losers" when "The A-Team" is coming out two month later, we want a brutal version of that concept. When you cast the most morally reprehensible superhero to date as your lead, what else are we to expect?
The script also fails to work with the runtime. At first, I was enjoying the jump from action scene to action scene, but once the feature slows down to try and force a chemistry-lacking romance and leave us with a questionably motivated Idris Elba as Rogue, the pacing falls apart. This led me to think that the challenges for the Losers needed to be more complex, "Mission Impossible" like sequences as a reward for the phoned in exposition. Instead, you get CGI explosions and toned down "Die Hard" deaths.
Speaking of phoned in, some of the actors are guilty of that. I may have to rewatch "The Reaping" (I may, but I will not.) to see if this was the first disappointing Idris Elba performance. When you see how his character's story arc resolves, you can understand why. Zoe Saldana seems to just push through the need to be interested in the more rugged and older Morgan, but if the script will not be subtle with developing chemistry, force is all you have.
It is a pity that the script resulted in these lackluster performances because Chris Evans finds the perfect medium between Captain America and Ransom from "Knives Out" in terms of snarkiness while Columbus Short and Oscar Jaenada round off the comedic elements of the team well. Jason Patric and Holt McCallany also have a great villain relationship and are both going for broke knowing that the audience will want to see that.
"The Losers" has some fun performances but cannot overcome the production having no clue about how to sell this idea. It promises to cram in a lot of darker comic book elements into a 97-minute package, but believing the potential audience would be cut in half, backs down on everything it proposes. After "The Boys" and that year's "Kick Ass" bad boys are allowed to do bad things. But with this failure, "The Losers" is just a lost opportunity to give us a grounded "Deadpool" tale.
Cursing: The Cubs, Soccer Planet, and "Lost and Delirious"
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