{"id":379,"date":"2010-05-04T11:41:26","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T11:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ealasaid.com\/writing\/reviews\/2010\/05\/04\/the-losers\/"},"modified":"2022-06-11T11:24:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-11T18:24:00","slug":"the-losers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/2010\/05\/04\/the-losers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Losers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Directed by: Sylvain White<br \/>\nStarring: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, Oscar Jaenada, Jason Patric, Holt McCallany<br \/>\nRated: PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, a scene of sensuality and language.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nSometimes you sit down to watch a movie and it&#8217;s like sitting down to a burger and fries from your favorite fast-food joint. It&#8217;s not nutritious. It&#8217;s not going to surprise you with subtle flavors. It&#8217;s going to taste like every other burger you&#8217;ve had there, and that is why your mouth waters for it.<br \/>\n&#8220;The Losers&#8221; is like that. I was muttering the dialogue under my breath ahead of the characters sometimes, and laughing at wildly inappropriate things because I was so delighted at how precisely it fulfilled my expectations. When the heroes let the children they just rescued from a drug lord get on their helicopter, I just knew that helicopter was going down. It did, of course, because Our Heroes annoyed a supervillain who wears one glove and shoots his umbrella handlers when they don&#8217;t keep a good grip on his umbrella.<br \/>\nSo our heroes, a team of walking-stereotype black-ops specialists, find themselves presumed dead and stuck in Bolivia. Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the gruff leader whose weakness is volatile women, wants to find a way to get back at Max (Jason Patric), the crazed genius who set them up. His men are Jensen (Chris Evans), the mouthy computer genius of the team; Cougar (Oscar Jaenada), the strong, silent sniper; Roque (Idris Elba), the knife-wielding demolitions expert; and Pooch (Columbus Short), the driver and heavy weapons man.<br \/>\nNo action movie is complete without a beautiful, mysterious woman, and Aisha (Zoe Saldana) fits the bill perfectly. She&#8217;s improbably thin, absolutely gorgeous, and a nigh-invincible fighter, able to hold her own in hand-to-hand combat against Clay (which is basically foreplay, of course. Their first date results in the hotel being burned down, and that&#8217;s before they actually fall into bed together). She has access to vast amounts of money, lots of power, and wants to fund Our Heroes so they can take down Max.<br \/>\nAlong the way to that final showdown between Clay and Max there are lots of gunfights, some PG-13 sexy scenes, and lots and lots and lots of one-liners. Most of them belong to Jensen, who manages to be the team&#8217;s computer nerd in spite of being just as muscly and good with weapons as the rest of the team. He proudly wears a violently pink shirt to support his niece&#8217;s soccer team (&#8220;Go Petunias!&#8221; is his battle cry at one point) even while in hiding, and steals just about every scene he&#8217;s in if only through sheer ridiculousness.<br \/>\nJust about everything in &#8220;The Losers&#8221; is distilled action flick perfection. It&#8217;s a bit heavier on the choppy editing and Woo-style slow motion than some folks may like, but the script and acting are spot-on hilariously awesome. This is not an intellectually stimulating film. This is not a film full of subtlety and brilliantly-crafted puzzles. This is a film which includes a motorcycle on fire crashing into a plane and making it explode.<br \/>\nIf that last sentence makes you exclaim &#8220;awesome!&#8221; then &#8220;The Losers&#8221; is your kind of movie. Don&#8217;t miss it! If, on the other hand, it makes you roll your eyes, stay away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Directed by: Sylvain White Starring: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, Oscar Jaenada, Jason Patric, Holt McCallany Rated: PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, a scene of sensuality and language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-actionfestorama-2"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2oSX4-67","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ealasaid.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}