{"id":5095,"date":"2010-04-23T14:36:35","date_gmt":"2010-04-23T18:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5095"},"modified":"2011-06-05T18:58:02","modified_gmt":"2011-06-05T22:58:02","slug":"the-losers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5095","title":{"rendered":"The Losers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"There aren\u2019t a lot of actors that I bring negative baggage to when I see them on the screen. My job is to be as objective as I can, within my own subjectivity. In general, I would try to avoid films where these actors have lead roles, it wouldn\u2019t be fair otherwise. And early on in his career Chris Evans was not a distraction for me. I thought he was perfectly adequate in the underrated parody Not Another Teen Movie<\/em>, ignorable in Cellular<\/em>, and no worse than anyone else in the cheap looking, but surprisingly expensive The Fantastic Four<\/em><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 He really began to grate on my nerves first in London<\/em>, Sunshine<\/em>, and especially Street Kings<\/span><\/a><\/em>, where I described his scenes where he joins up with fellow blank slate Keanu Reeves as a team that \u201cought to win some sort of MTV Movie award for least convincing duo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"Then what does it say about Sylvain White\u2019s The Losers<\/em> that Evans, who has a supporting role, has the only good scene in the film? And is it a good omen that the scene is little more than a clever series of references to another Joel Silver production<\/span><\/a>, The Matrix<\/em>, where Evans (apparently interchangeable with Keanu, as evidenced by the mock drawing from this site<\/span><\/a>, and my further interpretation next to it) has to sneak into an office building, and when he gets into a jam, asks his \u201cboss\u201d, via earpiece, to \u201cfind me an exit.\u201d<\/p>\n

That energetic and ridiculous and sequence where Evans threatens security by pointing his fingers at them like a gun and warning them that he has special powers so his hands are lethal weapons, also has a reference to Wanted<\/span><\/a><\/em>, which, like The Losers<\/em> is based on a graphic novel. However, Wanted<\/em> was willing to go all the way in its adaptation and really push the levels of violence and absurdity, while The Losers <\/em>hides behind the more marketable and wimpy PG-13 rating.<\/p>\n

\"\"Now there have long been complaints about films with R rated content trying to squeeze into a PG-13 film (The Lovely Bones<\/em> is a rather egregious recent example), and the awkwardness that occurs as a result, and The Losers <\/em>is no different. The MPAA has nebulous rules about \u201cintensity,\u201d as if a movie should be penalized for being effective. As a result, The Losers <\/em>plays like a grungy, sweaty action movie with all the energy sucked out of it. If while you\u2019re sitting in the theater watching The Losers<\/em>, you suspect that someone might have pumped Valium into the air conditioning vents, you\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just that The Losers<\/em> has a second-rate version of The A-Team<\/em> feel, with a motley crew of tough guys with their various specialties in weaponry and wisecracks, it also smells like, with its rather scenic looking jungle footage, it was shot on the Warner backlot. The fact that the movie was actually<\/em> shot in Puerto Rico, says either that Puerto Rico looks like a studio set, or White and Silver should have found a more remote area that didn\u2019t have narratively convenient clearings ready for helicopter shoot-outs. The bad omen is that the jungle material is the inciting incident, as the soon-to-be-disgraced military team tries, at the last moment, to save children being used as drug mules from the impending missile attack on a compound full of brown people with accents. When their honorable decision gets the children killed anyway (though, their drug-filled insides would likely have exploded due the constant running and stress caused by the situation), the shock of the situation is undermined by the jokey tone of the film.<\/p>\n

\"\"It would be nice to say that the revenge plot that follows, where the perfectly racially mixed team goes after \u201cMax\u201d (played by Jason Patric under an unfortunately obvious hair weave) is parody*. We get the lame dialogue (\u201che wants the girl amscray\u201d), the incoherent McGuffin (which is some sort of way to physically store and move money in a hard drive), the constantly changing allegiances that are random at best, the extraneous sequence of cockfighting, the generic looking cast that kind of look like other B-level actors but aren\u2019t (Is that Michael Pare? Nope. Is that Donald Faison? Nope. Is that Javier Bardem? Nope.) the rapey, beat-me-til-I-like-it feel of the sex scene, and the weird production mistakes (a whiskey bottle explodes before<\/em> it hits the wall). But it isn\u2019t parody, it\u2019s just a half-baked quickie trying to beat The A-Team <\/em>movie to the punch, before the inevitable unrated DVD version with several\u00a0 more minutes of violence and nudity. Wouldn\u2019t it have simply made more sense to dump The Losers<\/em> onto DVD, like one of those quickies from The Asylum<\/span><\/a> (Transmorphers, Snakes on a Train, I Am Omega<\/em>) that come out a week or two before major blockbusters?<\/p>\n

* Overheard at the screening, but expressed as a compliment, \u201cThat was like an episode of Leverage<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There aren\u2019t a lot of actors that I bring negative baggage to when I see them on the screen. My job is to be as objective as I can, within my own subjectivity. In general, I would try to avoid films where these actors have lead roles, it wouldn\u2019t be fair otherwise. And early on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5282,173,6362,6354,527,6358,6141,6350,6352,1209,4428,154,6363,6360,4169,5099,4466,6359,172,4556,140,310,6349,4186,6357,6356,3043,6361,6080,6351,6213,459,5944,6348,6364,6355,4042,6353,6321],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}