“It might still be alive, poke it with your gun.”
I put off dealing with this film for a week now, basically because it is crap. But also because prior to this film screening there were the obligatory previews, one of them was for the A-Team, which got me thinking…
“Ten years ago , a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team.”
Now let’s compare, just for fun.
“A while back a crack military unit was framed for a crime they didn’t commit. After mistakenly being thought dead they lie low in the South American underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as a pack of idiots. Zoe Saldana has a problem, no one else can help, and she has found them, maybe she will team up with… The Losers.”
Well as long as we are all agreed that the above doesn’t sound like a generic rip off released in a poorly timed manner I believe we can move on.
I think the ideal target audience for The Losers have short attention spans, low standards and high pain thresholds. Therefore the rest of this review is in bullet point form. I also put a lot of purrty pictures for you to look at!
The action is:
– Heavily stylised but not really very violent.
– Perplexing. People are killed for laughs by the bad and good guys, yet sometimes we are expected to care and other times we apparently needn’t.
– Full of hackneyed tactics and tricks, (Woosh, “I’m jumping away from an explosion!”)
– Hurried up for plot over logic, Top Secret stuff is accessed and downloaded in the seconds.
– Full of slo-mo, freeze-frame and even onscreen cartoonery.
The Losers are:
– Well muscled and immaculately coiffed.
– Macho and wise crackin’ even in the middle of a firefight.
– Brave and laugh in the face of danger, (again cracking terrible jokes all the while.)
– Ethical, they’ll disobey orders to “do the right thing”.
– Video game characters, judging by the fact that one shot in the leg can get up and run after being bandaged up. Yay health packs!!
Jason Patric is:
– An accomplished actor with a solid CV over many decades.
– Obviously in dire need of cash to ham his way through this dreck as the bad guy.
Zoe Saldana is:
– Hot, but somehow hotter when she was 9 ft tall and blue.
– Down to her undies a couple times in the film.
– Only in the film because of the two points above.
Now that’s exotic!
And there were multiple scenes with American flags flapping in the background, I don’t mean in the distance, I mean the whole screen had a Stars and Stripes backdrop. If this was to distract from how bad this is I understand, as many “US Americans” might not want to appear unpatriotic by booing anything with the flag in full view. (Seriously I had no idea the flag was in the background of the cast shot until I put the review up!)
They should.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. So very unnecessary and annoyingly average. I didn’t (and don’t) think the A Team will be much chop, but it would need to suck right royal to be worse than this… and they set things up for a sequel?!?
