Movies based on comic books, especially Marvell comics (Spider-Man!) are the types of movies that I really want to see in the theater.   The Losers is based on a comic book, I guess, not that I had ever heard of it.  It’s about a covert hit team that gets double crossed way down in Bolivia and then has to make some compromises in order to get back to the states so they can get answers, revenge, and their old lives back.

The movie has some great action scenes and some nifty cinematography that invokes the scene by scene transitions you would find in a comic book, I’ll give it that, and comic book based movies could make good use of this technique to great effect in the future.  The issue I take with it is that it takes a comic book and puts into our world, so when you are watching some of the scenes the suspension of disbelief is broken as you think “no way would that have worked.”  Movies like Spider Man or the Watchmen change the world enough so that you can take little details and shelve them and that makes them digestible as a whole.  Without having read the comic, I think what happened was the PG-13 rating and the decision to try and keep the setting light, which didn’t jive while at all with what was going on, they just made the good guys too “good.”  How am I supposed to feel sorry for these guys when they cause huge collateral damage to people in the way of their objectives?

I really enjoyed the character “Jensen” who has also played Johnny Storm (the guy who can start on fire) in the Fantastic 4 and Captain America in the upcoming Avengers movie.  The character is a ripped, geeky commando who wears the best t-shirts (lol @ the zombie t-shirts) but can talk to women without making a fool out of himself.  Compared to the utterly cliched Colonel and Bad-Girl roles that are present, it was at least refreshing to have a new type of role and reminded me a lot of Battlefield Bad Company 2 – which is a good thing.  As a side note, how can you be both Johny Storm and Captain America?  It seems like at some point that could become an issue, didn’t the Fantastic 4 at least encounter the Avengers?

Anyway, the movie has been panned as a forgettable action flick, which I suppose it is.

Grade: C+

It’s worth a rental or Netflix queue addition if you do like action movies.

–Nat