“The Losers” vs. Bucho Jr.

Max wears a white suit. Most of the time he wears a matching glove on one hand. He’s evil. He’s in control of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he wants to start wars. He plans to do this by…dissolving?…Los Angeles with some kind of new weapon that turns land masses into pixels and swirls them into non-existence. The effect they use would’ve made an awesome screen saver in the 90s.

In his way, though, is the titular assembly of screwed-over special-ops soldiers thought to have been toasted in a Bolivian-jungle helicopter “accident.” However, instead of killing the Losers, Max’s missile kills 25 or so children that they’d just saved from a bombing. Good thing. Otherwise, there’d have been no movie. (Unless you want to make a movie about Bolivian kindergartners, and who’s going to see that?)

So, you know, vengeance unto Max would be nice—he having tried to kill them and he having framed them for the death of 25 children—but they’re kind of stranded in Bolivia. So, like, whatever. The Losers get jobs as mechanics and place bets on cock fights. That is, until they meet the lithe and enigmatic Aisha (Zoe Saldana), who promises to get them out of there and back to the States as long as they can help her “get” Max. Shortly after her appearance, she exchanges roundhouse kicks with Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the hairy, barrel-chested leader of the gang, then later has slow-motion hair-tossing sex with him. As one would expect. (I’m beginning to think she only goes for white guys. Not that, as one, I have a problem with that.)

From here, it essentially turns into a caper movie. Each of the guys has a particular talent, a la the “Ocean’s” integers and “The Italian Job“—Pooch does heavy ballistics, Cougar does “long-range-elimination,” etc. And thus equipped, they take on the CIA. Or something. Normally, I love caper movies. But this one lacked the charm of its predecessors. There are a few chuckles, but the majority of the jokes fall flat to the point of me cringing alone in the dark.

What ruined this movie for me, though, was not entirely the bad dialogue. It was the fact that Max, the villain, was about as complex as a beach ball. I saw this same guy in “Desperado” didn’t I? Bucho? Anyone?

While he admittedly had some funny lines, his character is written with such blatant laziness that one just becomes insulted after awhile. There’s no psychology to him. At least Magneto and Ozymandias had semi-coherent motivations, and the Joker…well…he had clearly swum way out beyond the safe harbor of the Sanity Fjord. This “Max” was essentially a Captain Planet villain: directionless evil. A demon on a lily pad.

And of course, for the sake of posterity, he gets away at the end.

So it is not without grounds to expect a follow up. I’m hoping they don’t make their money back, or if they do they simply smile and thank the Higher Powers and run. “The Losers” wasn’t terrible, but still, we don’t need any more of them. Polluting and polluting is not the way.