The Losers

Review by Jason Donner

Five soldiers are framed for a crime they didn't commit and, after breaking out if a federal penitentiary, they got jobs as guns for hire.  Now, if you need help and if you can find them, perhaps you'll call...

Wait, wrong set of soldiers.

So these five soldiers are framed and listed as K.I.A. when they weren't K.I.A. and, after languishing in Bolivia for a few months, they are contacted by a mysterious woman who offers them a ride back to the states and a shot at the man who framed them.

The Losers is one of those odd movies that is comfortable taking the identity of others.   In a sense, it's the Single White Female of movies -- devoid of personality and originality that it rummages through the closet of its fellow movie brethren looking for a pair of pants or a shirt that will make it look like something it admires.

Case in point?  During a break in at a software company, Chris Evans' character is cornered by security.  To get out of this, he points his fingers at the guards and proceeds to shoot them resulting in real bullet wounds.  The survivors are stunned.  How did he do this?  That's simple!  A sniper set up behind him!  How clever!  How funny!  How sad that Crank already did it!

The Losers established that pattern and faithfully sticks to it copying and repeating action scenes and heists from other movies.  While these "homaged" scenes are intercut with some fairly likeable characters and clever dialogue, it doesn't cover up the fact that this is all stuff you've seen before.  This movie was old before it even hit theaters.

What's worse is that the movie features Jason Patric as a bad guy who is so over the top and so outrageous that every scene he's in seems to be a desperate attempt to illicit laughter from the audience of losers unfortunate enough to plunk down money for this carbon copied movie.

The Losers isn't awful, but rather is settles to be a forgettable movie confident in its ability to entertain for an evening and then be forgotten a few weeks later.  The ending of The Losers is so badly edited and so horribly directed that the bad guy develops magical leaping powers to appear on a bus when he should have been stuck up in a crane.  At that point, I stopped caring because it was more than obvious that the filmmakers had too.