The Losers

That's Who We Are

A group of highly trained soldiers got framed for a military crime they did not commit, and these men promptly escaped to the Bolivian underground and are trying to figure things out and get home to the USofA. In the meantime, if you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you and find them, maybe you can hire, the A-Team, not!

The premise of The Losers well, sound very much like the other upcoming summer blockbuster and television remake The A-Team, with a group of military black ops men getting betrayed by the hand that fed them, and decide that it's payback time, their only clue being a voice at the other end of the line called Max (Jason Patric) who didn't have the compassion to abort an airstrike given the presence of children on the grounds of a drug baron. So our Losers - Colonel Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan of Watchmen's Comedian fame), 2nd in command Rogue (Idris Elba), sniper Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), vehicle expert Pooch (Columbus Short) and tech wizard Jensen (Chris Evans) - decide to hit the ground, only to find themselves become "ghosts" by the end of their ordeal.

Needing to gather resources to get home, it's basically seek and you shall find as the Losers hang around the Bolivian underground. Which is what Zoe Saldana's Aisha did, when she sought them out to help in her objective in eliminating their common enemy, the secretive Max. But Aisha herself is a bit of a wild card and serving as the romantic interest of Clay, brings about some tension between the well-oiled group of men. So essentially the story follows everything you see in the trailer, where the group get transported back to home soil, before their tasking for Aisha unravels a diabolical plan of Max's to seek out new high-tech WMDs (made by Indian scientists, rather than the usual Euro/Russian bandits) set to detonate at the LA Port.

There's only one singular objective in watching the Losers on the big screen, and that's to see how creative the action sequences can get. However, Sylvain White seem to have run out of fresh, innovative ideas, since almost everything here is something which you've probably seen before. Most of the action scenes were featured in the trailer, so that's just about spoil any would-be surprises, if at all. The fun of course is always when the Losers head into a mission utilizing the spectrum of their skillsets, although this sometimes would call for the suspension of belief.

For instance, there's the activation of bombs and the firing of weapons toward an armed motorcade in broad daylight in a busy major intersection, coupled with noisy helicopters flying overhead, and simply put, there isn't a single figure of authority around to give chase. Granted it's not that kinda movie, but still it makes everything seem really implausible, and can only come straight out of a graphic novel. Plot loopholes are aplenty as well, with the usual monologues and the why-must-I-line-them-up-to-shoot/kill-them routine, which is simply inexplicable.

The only way to enjoy this action flick, is to just accept everything at face value. It's not without positives though, and my vote goes to Chris Evans' role as Jensen being the live-wire character (as per the source material) in wise-cracking through the film, and fans of Captain Marvel will take note from this film that he's already bulking up in time to be that super soldier Steve Rogers.