I'm not a big fan of "The Losers".I admit that I wasn't in the best mood when I sat down in the theatre with my brother and my cousin to view the film. I was very tired, and I had a splitting headache. I was somewhat conflicted, anyway.
I had never read the comic books on which the film is based, and my reactions to the marketing materials were generally positive. But I also understood that the comic book was more of a "mature readers" affair, being published by DC's Vertigo imprint, and that director Sylvain White had made a more family-friendly affair.
That stuff always bothers me, I can't help it. Knowing that an adaptation has been purposefully toned-down from its source material to appeal to a wider audience always strikes me as selling out.
I read an interview with White where he explicitly stated that Warner Bros. was completely open to an R-rated "Losers" film, but White decided to shoot a PG-13 movie, "so the 13 and 14 year-olds could see it". That rubs me the wrong way. Why would you de-claw a story like this?
I've seen Sylvain White's "Stomp The Yard". I generally disliked it, although it was certainly competently made. I've also seen the direct-to-video "I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer", the film that turned the mediocre (and very much alive) villain "the fisherman" from the previous two films into a fucking zombie.
The film seriously tried to Jason Vorhees the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" franchise. God, what a fucking waste.
I guess I'm trying to say that I don't think much of Sylvain White. Sure, he's probably a nice fellow. And it's difficult to really blame the "I'll Always Know" movie on the man. He was just getting started in the business with that movie, and he didn't write the dreadful screenplay. Besides, his visual style did improve between this and "Stomp The Yard".
And "The Losers" is very slickly made, with nice shot compositions, and a very stylish look. But I can't get over the fact that it was White's decision to turn an R-rated comic book into a PG-13 movie.
To be fair, the comic book may be terrible. "Kick-Ass" was based on a dreadful comic book with a good premise, and it turned out pretty great. So maybe Sylvain White was just doing his best with mediocre source material.
Either way, I wasn't terribly impressed.
The basic plot: a US Special Forces team is on assignment in Bolivia. Their basic job is to paint a target with a laser for a bombing run. The target: the compound of some warlord named Fadhil. I don't know exactly what this Fadhil character has done to earn flaming death from above, and the reasons are never explained. It's all so nebulous.
While waiting for the jets to rain hell on Fadhil's house of pain, team member Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) spots a busload of children arriving in the compound via his sniper scope. Team leader Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) decides to send the team in to rescue the children before the jungle becomes a wall of fire.
The team escapes with the children, loading them onto the evac chopper in their stead, opting to wait on-site for another ride. Once in the air, the chopper is struck with a missle, and all the poor kiddies die. The chopper was blown to kingdom come on the orders of some shadowy puppet master called Max (Jason Patric), who had some kind of relationship with Fadhil.
So apparently Max ordered the destruction of Fadhil's compound, although once again, it is never explained how Max has the kind of authority to order a US Special Forces team to do his dirty work.
There's never even any attempt at an explanation. It's frustrating. The film gives its audience the bare bones of a story, and never bothers to fill in any of the details.
Now if you're, for example, a guy like David Mamet, you can get away with this kind of trick, because your stripped-down story is strong enough to allow your audience to read between the lines. The details seem to be there, although they are never explicitly stated.
Take "Spartan", for example. Val Kilmer's character is obviously a former marine, but we never learn exactly who he is currently working for. CIA? NSA? It's never clear. We don't even learn that the kidnapped politician's daughter is, in fact, the daughter of the President until late in the game, and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss that fact completely.
Does this make "Spartan" hard to follow, or a hollow film? Absolutely not. Because David Mamet is a master when it comes to streamlined storytelling. You know what you need to know.
Sylvain White, on the other hand, is not David Mamet.
We understand that this Max character, whoever the hell he is, wanted Fadhil dead, and decided to kill Clay and his team because they chose to save a group of children from a firey demise.
Why? Fadhil still died. It's not like Max's goals were not accomplished. His target was eliminated. So why complicate matters by killing a Special Forces unit that still essentially accomplished his/their mission? To tie up loose ends? That doesn't hold water. The team didn't explicitly disobey orders. The people that needed to get dead got dead.
Their sin was mercy. Some cute little kids who didn't deserve to die got saved. And for their trouble, Clay's team had to watch in horror as the kids got blown up, anyway. Of course, Max thinks that Clay and his team were onboard the chopper went it exploded, so he thinks they're dead.
The team spends an indeterminate amount of time in Bolivia, working odd jobs in attempt to earn enough money to get back to the United States. I'm not sure why, exactly. I know that one of the team members, Pooch (Columbus Short) has a pregnant wife back home, and he wants to get back to her. I understand that. But if these guys resurface, aren't they targets for Max's wrath? I mean, he wanted them dead for some fucking reason, right?
Clay and Roque (Idris Elba) seem to understand this. Roque wants to disappear, but Clay wants revenge. And the opportunity presents itself in the form of Aisha (Zoe Saldana), an enigmatic figure (sensing a pattern, here...) who claims she can get "The Losers" back to the US and get their revenge on the evil Max.
Aisha is another character that doesn't really make sense to me. She has a secret (spoiler alert! she's the daughter of deceased warlord Fadhil, and wants revenge against Max for ordering his death), and she also has a lot of money. She manages to smuggle the team back into the country in coffins (love the symbolism, there), supplies them with a lot of hardware and intel, and even shows up with a rocket launcher at one point to save the day.
I'm not sure where all of this money came from, but being the daughter of a shadowy South American warlord, perhaps she inherited a large sum of blood money. Who can say?
So the stage is set for a big confrontation with eeeeevil Max. The Losers want revenge. Max wants to set off some completely implausible super weapon in Los Angeles Harbor, which will apparently start a war with somebody.
Once again, it's all vague. I suppose Max is one of those people who believes that war is good for business, but it never really sticks. By the end of the movie, you're apt to forget that little detail, anyway.
In "The Fifth Element", weapons dealer Zorg, played with maniacal charm by Gary Oldman, gives a speech about how his business is essentially good for humanity.
He justifies his existence by explaining how his weapons manufacturing plants employ countless people, who each depend on the continued use of these weapons for their jobs. If these weapons were no longer needed, then the economy could very well collapse, and all of these countless employees would be jobless, homeless, and hopeless.
Zorg sees himself as a champion of life. It's a very good moment, and it sums up the character of Zorg perfectly. Or maybe not, considering he's working for an entity that intends to extinguish all life in the Universe. Hmm...
Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that Max doesn't have a moment like that in "The Losers". He never really justifies what he's doing, beyond the vague "start a war, make money" implication. We never really learn a damn thing about Max, which is incredibly frustrating.
He's a bad guy, sure. But what else is there? Nothing. He's just a bad guy. It's so one-dimensional.
Which I suppose is a bad thing, except for the fact that Jason Patric is the single best thing about this movie. He plays Max like... well, I'm not sure. There seem to be elements of Christopher Walken at his scenery-chewing best in there, but that's not all.
There's some bizarre quality to his performance that I found utterly amazing. It's in his line delivery, his mannerisms, his general attitude. Jason Patric is acting in a completely different movie from the rest of the cast. I'm not even sure I can rightly call what he's doing "acting". It's something else. Something fantastic.
There's a scene with Max talking to his right hand man Wade, where he requests his henchman to recruit an 18 man fire squad that would have been completely mundane with anybody else. But with Jason Patric's performance, it became one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie for a while.
His repeated insistence on an "18 man fire squad!" produced a protracted laughing fit from me. I laughed for so long, I'm sure the other people in the theatre were wondering what the fuck was wrong with me.
As Jason Patric continued to exist onscreen, I couldn't stop laughing. From Max's amazement when he realizes he's standing next to a very short man, to his deadpan reaction when he realizes he's playing Go Fish with a thug who doesn't understand the game, I loved this character.
I've liked Jason Patric since the first time I saw "The Lost Boys", although he never really played any of his characters in a comedic fashion. In the wrong role, Patric can be more wooden than the titular Wicker Man, and even in the right role, he doesn't really stand out to a general audience. He's always been an odd duck.
But when he hosted Saturday Night Live in 1994, I became a fan of Jason Patric.
In one sketch, he played a hand model who lost the tip of one of his fingers in an automobile accident, and descended into alcoholism and misery. Until a one-eyed menswear catalogue model played by Phil Hartman shows him that just because he's disfigured doesn't mean that his career is over.
The sketch is burned into my memory. It's a classic. And for years afterward, I lamented the fact that nobody in Hollywood would attempt to cast Jason Patric in a comedic role. He clearly had it in him to be really funny. But nobody would give him a chance.
And then I saw "The Losers".
I suppose I should thank Sylvain White for putting Jason Patric in his film. But I have a feeling that White was in no way responsible for Patric's performance. I wouldn't be surprised if most of Max's dialogue was improvised on Patric's part.
Every aspect of his performance in this film completely clicked with me. When I left the theatre, I wondered if I just hallucinated his entire role. Nobody else in that auditorium seemed to care. In fact, I'm sure most people just found him annoying.
I've read online in several reviews that Jason Patric's performance nearly ruins the film. What fucking movie did these people see? He single-handedly saves the film. He picks up this mediocre motion picture and carries it to the finish line on his insane shoulders.
If Jason Patric were not in this movie, I would have hated it. So Jason Patric wins.
That's not to say that everyone else in the cast sucks. They don't. They just don't bring anything new to the table. Jeffrey Dean Morgan does a fine job as Clay. He's likeable enough, but I just don't buy him as the team leader of an elite military unit.
Chris Evans is often quite funny as the team nerd, Jensen, although he tends to wear a lot of annoying t-shirts. The audience thought this was funny. I just thought it was boring.
Columbus Short's Pooch is really just "the other black guy". He's a competent actor, but when he shares the screen with a guy like Idris Elba, he's always gonna be the second fiddle.
After he gets shot in both legs, Jensen drags him around, calling him "Legless Pooch". It's funny, but it's also a metaphor for his character. The other, more charismatic actors are just kinda dragging him along throughout the movie.
Oscar Jaenada doesn't have many lines, which makes sense because this is one of his first english language roles, but he does manage to have one or two standout moments as a mostly silent badass sniper.
Zoe Saldana is attractive. But she doesn't bring anything else to her performance. The director was more interested in lingering shots of her ass in tight jeans than in asking her to actually attempt to act. She did a good job in "Star Trek", but maybe that's because J.J. Abrams is a more actor-focused director.
Idris Elba is just a damn good actor. You can tell because he manages to make a one-note character like Roque likeable. He's supposed to be more of a pragmatist than the other Losers, having no family members and no real friends aside from his other team members. He likes knives, and he argues with Clay. That's all Roque is.
But Elba takes this sketch of a character and imbues him with the spark of life. Roque inexplicably betrays the team in the final act, creating unnecessary drama. I understand that this follows the plot of the comic book, but also that his character in the book is more of a cold-blooded individual, so that his betrayal doesn't feel out of place.
In the film, Roque is much more buddy-buddy with his teammates, and his eventual betrayal is completely out of character. After Roque starts working for Max, the character becomes more of a moustache-twirling villain, and Idris Elba deserved better.
In the climax, the Losers confront Max and attempt to disarm his superweapon, called a "snuke". Now it's not particularly intelligent to name your film's ultimate weapon after a plot device in an episode of South Park. Especially when that plot device happens to be a nuclear weapon smuggled inside of of Hilary Clinton's vagina.
Every time I heard the word "snuke", I just snickered and thought of how much better that South Park episode was in comparison to this movie.
Roque gets blown up in a plane full of stolen CIA money, Clay disarms the "snuke" (chortle), and... that's it. There's no real resolution to the film. Max escapes to fight another day, and the Losers are still wanted men (although I'm sure exactly why). The movie just stops. It's infuriating.
Clearly, the director had a franchise in mind when he made this film. Unfortunately, "The Losers" is not exactly setting the box office on fire, so I highly doubt a sequel is forthcoming.
There are a few cutesy epilogues that exist simply for comedic value and fail in that regard, but the main plot of the film just ends in an abrupt cut. Bullshit, I say.
As I sat in the car on the way back from the cinema on Sunday afternoon, I kept thinking to myself, "I woke up for this?" I don't like this movie. It's completely disposable. The only really good thing about it was Jason Patric, but I would almost have preferred to discover his lunatic performance on DVD, because I was clearly the only person in that theatre who appreciated it.
I know that Peter Berg was developing this film for quite a while before he parted ways with it, so much so that he even has a co-screenwriter credit. I just wish that he had stayed on and directed the film. The property seems right up his alley.
I have to believe that he would have made a better film that Sylvain "I'll Always Know What You Did This Spring" White. Boo.
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