The yearly dose of comic book movies means not every entry will get the attention of audiences, and while The Losers did get an early spring release date, the film didn’t seem to enjoy the love its producers had wanted.

Initially developed with Peter Berg (Very Bad Things) on board as writer-director, Losers is also a co-production with Dark Castle Films, an outfit better known for bland and disappointing horror films like Whiteout (2009).

With Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) as director, the producers seemed to have hoped the film would’ve started a franchise, but what’s most baffling is why Losers was never developed as a cable TV series, because as a feature-length distillation of writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock’s series, it feels too compact; the final creation looks and feels like a souped up TV movie designed to hook viewers for a concept never to be.

There’s no gore, sadism, or controversial elements, which is actually a good thing, since Diggle’s intent was to riff on the cartoonish characters created by Shane Black (The Last Boyscout) during the heyday of bloated, goofball action films.

Tonally, one can also find similarities between Losers and Leverage, the TV series where a group of wronged crooks with special skills and varying social disabilities partake in episodic revenge schemes; in both cases, the characters are like petty siblings who would likely drive each other into sheer madness without an authoritative wrangler, a leader who’s also affected by his own set of murky demons – which in the case of Losers is the eerily patient Clay (Watchmen’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

The basic revenge plot has a team of brilliant misfits being told by a shady CIA operative named Max (Jason Patric) to extract a wanted drug kingpin in South America, in spite of kids being present the compound. When the so-called Losers save the rugrats from danger and pack them into a chopper originally hired to ferry themselves to safety, the craft is destroyed by a missile strike, sending the Losers into hiding, and biding time until a plan to return to the U.S. is hatched, thereby enabling them to hunt down and kill the unseen operative known only as Max for killing the kiddies, and forcing the Losers to live as fugitives in a sleazy border town.

SPOILER ALERT

The group’s unwanted benefactor, Aisha (Zoe Saldana), keeps her motivations mum from all; what’s important is that in exchange for a return ticket to the U.S., the Losers will hunt down Max. At first Aisha’s eyes seem centered on Max’ money trove, but she eventually reveals herself as the kingpin’s daughter, out to revenge his death. Although she continues to aid and save the group from Max’ henchmen, Aisha will mete out revenge on Clay, since he’s the person who shot her father before Max’ missile strike on the compound.

The action sequences are slick and fun (and consist of great practical effects), the camaraderie among the Losers is goofy and yields a number of bouncy insults, and there are plenty of absurd moments, such as Jensen’s (Chris Evans) game of air gun when he’s caught by building security, Pooch (Armored’s Columbus Short) always placing the same bobble-head Chihuahua on the dash of whatever vehicle he’s driving or flying, and Max exterminating an assistant because she wasn’t adept at shading her boss with an umbrella on a windy afternoon.

John Ottman’s score doesn’t really make much of an impression because most of the scenes are tracked with overused movie songs, leaving the brief score to handle only minor bridge scenes.

Where the film stumbles a bit is in the finale, where the remaining payback between Aisha and Clay has to be addressed, but not unlike the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), any killing of the hero is put into stasis: in Spy, the touchy issue is pushed aside after Bond pops a champagne cork and goes right into sex, whereas in Losers, Aisha hangs around into the end credits, where a series of vignettes show her comfortably nestled with the Losers after they’ve reunited with their families. Her statement “This isn’t over yet” is just plain bunk, unless her father’s killing would be revisited in another film outing.

Even Max remains alive (ready for a sequel), although his scene feels like an alternate ending coda that was used instead of another that’s archived as the Blu-ray’s lone deleted scene. That alternate has the ex-Loser Roque (Idris Elba) surviving a fiery plane explosion, and talking to a new “Max” (played by Chris Noth), evoking the rotating No. 2 characters in TV’s The Prisoner (1967).

END OF SPOILERS

In any event, while a modestly budgeted comic book film, The Losers should’ve been designed as a serial TV production; even a rudimentary dissection of the film’s plotting reveals junctures where whole episodes could’ve been spun, resulting in a short-run, engaging series with greater impact than a one-shot feature film in a cluttered marketplace frequented by fickle moviegoers. If the film’s producers have any foresight, they should plan a spinoff cable series, given the comic book’s creators always had a planned end point for their amusing characters.

Warner Home Video’s Blu-ray contains the standard grouping of making-of featurettes covering stunts, testosterone, and location work in Puerto Rico. The featurettes run around 5 mins., and the most engaging is an interview with Losers creators Diggle (the writer) and Jock (artist Mark Simpson), discussing the series’ genesis, and their views on the finished film.

© 2010 Mark R. Hasan