2 Weeks of Movies - The Losers

The Losers - 7/10

Another of your A Team style special ops movies, less publicised than others and easy to miss. But missing it would be a shame. This was a fun movie! True, the premise, plot and characters are all a bit cliché now. True, you could tell exactly what was going to happen throughout most of the film. But that doesn't really matter when it's this enjoyable.

The action scenes were great, the story was satisfying, the characters were all good (with the possible exception of the obligatory mysterious woman, who got annoying at points), and the film was well paced. The latter is a problem for a lot of modern action films for some reason – everything seems to be based on the ‘first half is all exposition, second half is all action’ rule these days. This one, thankfully, avoided dying the boredom through too much or not enough action death. It also injected a lot of humour, particularly into action scenes, which really helped to lift it above its many competitors in the minefield of ‘special-ops-team-gone-rogue-because-of-corrupt-government’ movies. One scene in particular, involving ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ and some well-timed sniping, is genius.

I have never read the comics – in fact, I didn’t even know that it was based on a comic before seeing it – but watching it, I can see the influence. There is a slight risqué edge to it (killing a helicopter load of children in the first ten minutes for example), a sense of fun familiarity with the characters, a heart and soul to it that something like ‘The Expendables’ couldn’t seem to conjure up, and most importantly, a slightly tongue-in-cheek attitude of playing with the viewer. We all know we’re not taking this one too seriously.

I’ve heard people say this is ‘the poor man’s A Team.’ Personally, I thought it was miles better than ‘The A Team.’ This is what ‘The A Team’ should have been.