The Losers

The latest comic book to get a Hollywood going-over, ‘The Losers’, is a growling, paranoid graphic novel about a renegade military unit transformed into a 12-certificate bro-out. And it isn’t half bad: unmemorable but fast and flashy, and less bloated than the kind of action number that keeps John Travolta in Lear jets. Plugging into the zeitgeist for films about dark forces pulling strings in government, it opens with the unit – still kosher – carrying out covert black ops. They’re in Bolivia to do the CIA’s (presumably illegal) bidding, taking out a drugs baron.

Only when they arrive, the baron is using children as mules. Their handler, Max – the puppet master – orders them to strike regardless. Refusing, they come under attack from their own side, and presumed dead, disappear off into hiding promising payback. All the usual soldierly suspects are here: motormouth geek, family man, taciturn shooter, the really hard one – played perfectly decently by Chris Evans, Columbus Short, Oscar Jaenada and Idris Elba, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the colonel. There’s even a hot chick, Zoë Saldana, who handles weapons like a trooper, sometimes in her knickers.

‘The Losers’ never stretches any of these stereotypes or hazards anything that might confound its audience. When the plot turns – as it inevitably must – to Max amassing a nuclear arsenal, we’re told he purchased them from ‘the ‘multinational-maker-of-everything’. Funny, but it’s a reminder there’s nothing new going on here. All of which might leave fans of the comic hankering for its foul-mouthed fatalism – when the prospect of going after the CIA gave one soldier the ‘squirrelly shits’. Here, it’s more like dude, where’s my AK?