The Losers (2010)
| Overall |  | Story | |
| Production |  | Acting | |
I never wrote a review of The Losers after I watched it last weekend because … well … there wasn’t much to write about. It’s a competent action movie based pretty solidly on The Losers, a Vertigo comic series from the early-mid-00s by Andy Diggle and Jock. It has appropriate amounts of action, stuff blowing up, guns, action shots, Big Government conspiracy, more stuff blowing up, bad guys getting their just deserts, good guys getting some victories, Evil Smarmy Uber-Villains walking away for a sequel unlikely to happen …
The movie didn’t do very well in the theaters, from what I heard, which makes that sequel, as noted, unlikely. I’m okay with that because, honestly, the movie doesn’t add much to the books (which I read at the time, and am considering re-acquiring as TPBs). There are a few differences — the family backstories were padded out, the Clay/Aisha relationship is bumped up (so to speak) a bit, and we learn up-front what created the team and their antipathy to “Max” — but there’s a lot of scene-by-scene adaptation here, not quite of Watchmen slavishness but enough to show that the producers knew they had a good thing that was actually portrayed pretty cinematically to begin with.
Where there are changes, they’re mostly to accommodate a stand-alone 98-minute movie, which parallels most of the events in the initial “Goliath” storyline of the series, plus the elements noted above. And it’s well-done in a workmanlike fashion. Definitely worth seeking out on Netflix when it gets there, or as an inspiration to read the books (which are being republished in 12-issue collections).
Actingwise — well, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Clay is a bit beaten-down soft (though that works), and Zoe Saldana’s Aisha is a bit too pretty (but suitably vicious). The rest of the team are all handled pretty well (as makes sense for largely paper-cutout figures — the nerd, the sniper, the cutthroat, the enforcer — at least as presented here), and Jason Patric’s Max is a nicely iconic villain you both chuckle over and long to see meet a truly horrific end.
I don’t at all regret seeing it, and it was an entertaining way to pass some time, but I’m not hot and heavy to see it again.