The Losers
One look at "The Losers" and people realize right away that it's a rip-off of The A-Team. What's most disappointing about it is that it is basically the same quality as the 80's TV show. In fact, I think the studio probably would have been better off just making a film out of a "Burn Notice' or "Leverage" script. (Although, to be fair, "Burn Notice" is usually better than this film.)
The first problem is that the entire film is nonsense. And I don't mean that in a "Live Free or Die Hard" fun nonsense (even though a key moment is kind of taken from that film), I just mean that nothing makes sense. The film opens with a nice scene but after that it just falls apart. When Zoe Saldana's character meets Jeffrey Dean Morgan's leading man, they fight. Why? No reason. And then after fighting they finally speak two lines and everything's cool. I know some people might say, "Woah! Spoiler!" but it's not really spoiling anything. You know how the fight is going to end and you never really know why they are fighting anyway. If they had tweaked it and played it as a parody, it might have worked but they didn't so it was just the first in many random scenes.
On the bright side, the film wasn't boring and there were some good performances. But the direction was pretty shoddy and made me miss Michael Bay who actually knows how to use music and slow motion in his films. Also, there were two horrible CG moments that really took me out of the climatic moments.
For more (including actual SPOILERS), keep reading.
Besides just rewriting the script to be a parody of action films, the first thing I would have done with this film is switch Morgan and Idris Elba. Maybe it's me but Morgan always kind of bothered me in the film whereas I sympathized with Elba. Even when he was turning on his team and selling everyone out, I kind of liked him. I just feel that Morgan would have been better in the turncoat role and Elba could have done more with the tortured soul role.
The stakes also needed to be played off one another better. The final scene made no sense. Max made it seem like he needed The Losers to break in so he could get the money but then it seemed like he was already there anyway so why did he need The Losers at all? Couldn't he have just stolen the money himself and blamed The Losers (who, after all, had just stolen an armored car in the middle of Miami.) But what was more annoying was that the final standoff also made zero sense and what probably should have (or was meant to be) a choice between getting their lives back or saving the world didn't work. I'm not sure why there was a need to take Max alive (like he was going to confess to masterminding everything?) and Morgan's character couldn't just choose NOT to stop the bomb because the bomb was right there. It was like, "You can stop the bomb or choose to take me in and have your word against mine although we'll never get to that point because the bomb will explode and kill all of us". The obvious choice would have been just shoot Max (because there was really no reason to keep him alive and The Losers had the money and the three other snukes as evidence) and I'm not sure why they didn't. And what about those three others snukes? Did they just leave them in the crate?
Midway through the film, I was wondering why the Save the World element wasn't really that strong. We were watching Jason Patric threaten to blow someplace up and start a war and The Losers were still focusing on revenge. Then I realized that they needed that save the world b-story so that The Losers could have actually accomplished something at the end of the day. Because the film ends and they are still apparently outlaws and you'd have to assume that Max was still in good with the CIA, since it was never proven that he was behind everything that nobody knew happened.
Even with all of these problems, the film could have been better but it was just so poorly made. I know Roger Ebert lauded Sylvain White's direction but I have no idea why. That film featured some of the worst slo-mo walking scenes in a while and even the interesting music choices were just gimmicks. Don't Stop Believing was funny at first but then was pointless. It's like they thought, "It'd be funny to use this song for an action scene" and then didn't go any farther than that. And the CG shots of Zoe shooting the rockets (another scene that made no sense) and the plane crashing were Youtube/Funny or Die levels of special effects.
There's just no reason to invest the time on this film
