Movie Review by Plugged In
It's the good guys with guns against the bad guys with snukes in this DC/Vertigo comic book actioner.
Clay, Roque, Pooch, Jensen and Cougar aren't CIA, NSA or Special Forces--anymore at least. They're just the Losers, a band of elite soldiers presumed dead in Bolivia after a mission goes bad. Very bad.
Bent on obtaining sonic nuclear "green bombs" to spark a global war, it's a powerful, cold-blooded government insider named Max who set them up and thought he'd had them killed. And since the Losers care about kids, country and revenge, not necessarily in that order, it's Max's head on a platter that they're after. If the CIA gets in the way, well, so much the better. That just means there'll be more guys to shoot at, 'cause the Losers love to shoot.
CONCLUSION
There is so much backstabbing and gunfire in this flick that at one point I actually lost track of
who was shooting whom and why. Not that I really cared. Killing and carnage shouldn't be sport. But you wouldn't know that from watching The Losers.
This is a callous film, indeed, even for a picture that hints at dark comedy.
The bad guy here (Max) is so bad as to be ridiculous. He shoots his assistant dead for letting the umbrella she's holding for him flutter in the wind, for instance.
As for the good guys--the Losers? They live up to their name. Trying to save a group of kids in the opening minutes hardly makes up for Clay and Roque chuckling and high-fiving each other after blowing up a police SUV, killing any officers inside and potentially hurting passersby. Jensen (with help from Cougar) makes a game of killing security guards who are just doing their jobs after he breaks into an office building.
So as the screening audience laughed at innocent people's violent deaths or injuries, I internally detached from the who-done-whom-wrong dilemmas onscreen and took to wondering what exactly makes onscreen violence so much fun for so many moviegoers.
That was exactly the moment at which a man's body gets sucked into a jet engine.
As the audience sniggered, I realized the only answer has to be desensitization. Evidently, if one watches enough of this stuff, morbidity turns into hilarity, pain into entertainment, right into wrong.
Yes, great comic material, all those other people's demises. Hatred, casual sex, rifle butts to the head, blackmail, set-ups, too. It's all just good humor and a fun time at the movies.
At least that's what we're told.
SOURCE: Plugged In - Meredith Whitmore
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