July 19, 2010

The Losers is the next in a long line of comics being hijacked for release on the big screen, but this time we aren’t dealing with mutants or genetically altered spiders. This time we have a group of badass Special Forces soldiers who get tricked into performing a mission of questionable ethics, refuse to carry out their orders, and are targeted for death. Thankfully they missed their extraction chopper, giving up their seats so 25 children could escape, so now they are only presumed dead, and they are pretty pissed about those 25 kid-corpses scattered about the flaming chopper wreckage as The Losers title card splashes across the screen.

Having recently viewed the remake of The A-Team I was prepared to make all sorts of comparison but there really aren’t any. The Losers is a much more serious action flick where most of the comedy gets handed off to the villain, Max (Jason Patric) who has surrounded himself with inept henchmen and seems to use sarcasm and dry one-liners to ease his own pain. In fact, it was this very Max who ordered our heroes’ deaths.

So let’s meet the team. Colonel Franklin Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) seems more comfortable in a sports coat and untucked shirt than fatigues. He is in charge of William Rogue (Idris Elba), gadget expert Jake Jensen (Chris Evans), pilot, Pooch Porteus (Columbus Short), and my favorite despite only having about four lines of dialogue, expert sniper, Cougar Alvarez (Óscar Jaenada) who says more with a tip of the hat than any script ever could. Having faked their deaths, they are stuck in some third-world country until Clay meets up with Aisha (Zoe Saldana). Now things get really complicated.

After a somewhat vigorous encounter back at Clay’s hotel room and a secondary meeting at a cemetery, Aisha gets our boys back into the US so they can get their revenge on Max. Meanwhile, Max is working on his own major arms deal by buying and selling SNUKES, a devastating bomb capable of making an entire island vanish from the planet with no radiation or any other unpleasant side effects. Our Losers perform a masterful heist, but instead of Max they have his hard drive with all his digital money he needs to pay for the SNUKES. Aware that the Losers are still alive, he hires an 18-man fire team to hunt them down – oops, cancel that. Kill those guys and let’s set a surprise ambush instead.

And that is what I loved about The Losers. The movie and the story are always in motion and the action is nonstop. Even when things slow down for a steamy encounter with Aisha and Clay the director quickly moves on to something more interesting. And even moments of pure exposition are peppered with attitude and conflict to keep audiences interested from start to finish.

Filmmaking: 9
Sylvain White directed this action film and you can tell this guy loves his videogames, especially first-person shooters. The opening pre-title sequence plays out just like an FPS with cool camera views and momentary slow motion or freeze frames as bullets impact bad guys. Later in the film during some sniper moments you get these awesome scoped views and even a camera that follows the bullet to its target. The action is totally enhanced with some visceral camera work and editing that had me anticipating each new sequence.

The cast was perfect, both in their selection and their performance. Often, in these ensemble movies supporting characters can lose their individuality, but everyone here manages to make the most with the screen time they are given, so much so that even a few minor lines of dialogue get paid off with amusing epilogues during the credit roll. Even Zoe manages to hold her own as the sole female in this testosterone fueled cast and movie. She can kick your ass and look sexy doing it.

Visuals: 10
The Losers explodes onto Blu-ray with a blinding 1080p/VC-1 transfer that is as colorful and oversaturated as a comic book. The film even uses comics as its inspiration for the title card and the various character introductions then takes a page from the Fringe playbook for layering in location titles as we travel around the globe from New Mexico, to Miami to Puerto Rico to Dubai, to the Port of Los Angeles and others. Small touches like these make the movie extremely fun. Black levels are solid and contrast is sharp, again, like a graphic novel, and the level of detail, especially in the close-ups, is off the charts. There is great color and texture and virtually no compression or other distracting artifacts to mar this otherwise flawless picture.

Sound: 10
BOOM! Goes the dynamite…and my subwoofer was working overtime to keep up with the explosive nonstop action in this movie. Needless to say, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix was put to some pretty intense tests with all sorts of gunfire and explosions, although I did feel the opening mega-explosion was pretty tame given the blast radius. The events surrounding the armored car heist sounded great, as did the final showdown in LA. Despite overwhelming sound effects the dialogue was mixed nicely and easily understood throughout. The soundtrack was amazing with plenty of cool beats. They even did some interesting jump cuts to actually sync the video to the music in one scene.

Value: 5
What looks like an impressive collection of extras is actually pretty tame in the scheme of things, especially on Blu-ray. There is no commentary from either director or cast leaving us with a shallow selection of featurettes including; Zoe and the Losers, a 6-minute fluff piece on how Zoe was picked for the movie, Band of Buddies: Ops Training, a 3-part, 16-minute piece that shows how the guys trained with real spec-ops soldiers and used real weapons. Action-Style Storytelling discusses the original comic book and how it made the shift to feature film along with some unique videogame-style cinematography, and there is one deleted scene that would have ruined a big surprise had it been left in. Things wrap up with a 14-minute first-look at the upcoming Batman: Under the Red Hood release and some BD-Live support, and a digital copy of the movie for your PC or mobile device.

Overall: 9.5
Within the first three days of having this movie I have watched it four times – it is just that much fun. At times I was reminded of The A-Team, but the characters and situations in this movie were so much better and the camera work and shooting style of Sylvain White blurred the lines of cinema and videogame perfectly. And this is one of those rare “guy movies” that the girls won’t mind watching cause it “has that guy from Grey’s Anatomy in it.” If you love clever action movies with a subtle layer of humor woven in then you definitely want to own The Losers.