Words: Emmett Barlow
Twitter: @EmmettBarlow
BORN TO LOSE
The Cap is back! Bringing justice to cinemas this week with Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Amazon Instant have a movie offering waiting to warm you up, or bring you down, from the Marvel universe’s latest offering of the star-spangled man with the criminally overlooked cinematic contraction of Andy Diggle and Mark Simpson’s graphic novel series, The Losers.
Director Sylvain White’s adaptation sees a pre-Cap Chris Evans team up with Idris Elba, Geoffrey Dean Morgan, and Guardians of the Galaxy’s Zoe Saldana as the Special Forces unit affectionately known as The Losers. The team of rogues are galvanized into revenge and testosterone fuelled offensive after being left for dead and framed for a crime they didn’t commit by their CIA handler, Max.
The Losers is unfortunately flawed, cliché heavy and prime cinematic junk food, predominately let down by an over egging of slow motion shots, so much so that it parts White’s direction gives the aesthetic appeal of a shampoo advert, or even a second-rate R ‘n’ B video. However, it is well-paced, charismatic and captures both the cartoonish nature of the comic and dead pan obnoxious one-liners of Diggle’s writing – a great accompaniment for those of a comic-book-movie disposition.
This film was unfortunately overshadowed in 2010 by the year’s absurd and clunky rival releases, The A-Team and The Expendables, both pictures’ marketing campaigns and shiny stars stole the audiences that this film rightly deserved. A worthy CBM that is as healthy as sweets, as subtle as a slap in the face, and as enjoyable and reckless as a film could possibly be – please kill some time and watch this wickedly underrated film that accompanies Chris Evans’ superhuman cinematic offering.
FILM IN WORDS 