The Losers was one of those movies that came out only a few years before the trend of midnight screenings became a thing of the past, following the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting during a late screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Midnight screenings felt a little more like an event, and April 2010 alone had quite a few movies that made for fun late-night shows. Clash of the Titans, Date Night, Kick-Ass, and A Nightmare on Elm Street all gained a respectable level of critical appreciation, commercial appreciation, or a combination of the two. In short, maybe it was the fact that it was an unusually stacked April calendar that helps explain why this Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Zoe Saldaña-fronted DC Comics adaptation came and went from theaters with nary a word spoken about it.
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It’s a shame, too, because The Losers is actually a good bit of fun. This is especially true for Chris Evans, as the actor (one year shy of debuting as the MCU’s Captain America), steals his scenes.
What is The Losers About?
The Losers follows an elite team of U.S. Special Forces operatives who attempt to seek vengeance after one of their missions goes awry, thanks to their boss, Max (Jason Patric). Max, the voice in their ears, is on the wrong side of the law, and when he comes to believe his team has learned too much on this mission, he has a missile sent to blow up their exfil chopper. What Max doesn’t know is that they weren’t on that chopper – and that’s the way The Losers want to keep it until they’re ready to strike back.
After biding their time, the leader, Captain Franklin Clay (Dean Morgan) assembles his crew, made up of Evans’ intel specialist and hacker, Captain Jake Jensen; Elba’s explosives expert, Captain William Roque; Columbus Short’s heavy weapons specialist Sergeant Linwood “Pooch” Porteous; and Oscar Jaenada’s sniper, Sergeant Carlos “Cougar” Alvarez. But to kill Max, they first need to find Max, and that’s where Saldaña’s Aisha Al-Fadhil comes in. Unfortunately for Clay, one of his allies is an adversary secretly working for Max, so, by film’s end, he has to take out not only his former boss but a former friend, as well.
As critics pointed out, The Losers is not a movie that goes to many new places. But the well-worn avenues it does take are traversed with a smile and a sense of humor. Like he did in Tim Story’s two Fantastic Four movies, Evans displays a lot of charm and is the sole reason why the film’s best scene (the finger guns scene) works as well as it does.
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All in all, it’s a very rewatchable action-comedy. And, in relation to those aforementioned April 2010 releases, it’s certainly the second-best outside Kick-Ass (though Clash of the Titans is a tad on the over-hated side). The only performance that is a little off is Patric’s, who arguably leans into the silly, repetitive writing fueling Max more than was required.
It’s amazing The Losers continues to fly under the radar (though it did have a brief stint as Netflix’s number-one movie back in 2021). To be fair to general audiences and comics fans alike, the marketing material has never been too splashy about the film’s DC connection; however, what’s undeniable is that, had it been released a few years later, the film would have made a far more than $23.6 million domestically (failing to recoup its $25 million price tag – one of the more minuscule costs for a DC movie).
Lead Jeffrey Dean Morgan had been in another DC adaptation, Watchmen, the year prior, but even that was a niche product; he wouldn’t gain massive exposure until he joined The Walking Dead in 2016. Saldaña had broken through in a major way the prior year with Star Trek and Avatar (though she was, of course, unrecognizable in the latter), but she was still four years shy of joining the MCU. Elba was, like Evans, also a single year shy of joining the MCU as Heimdall in Thor. It would be interesting to see just how The Losers would have performed in, say, 2012 or 2013.
As it stands now, the film is a pretty wild – and entertaining – collection of “before their big-time” comic book movie/TV stars.
The Losers is available to stream on Max.
