Posts Tagged ‘The Losers’

Short Take: Pretty to look at and different, but only mildly interesting

Director: Olivier Megaton

Screenwriter: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Cast: Zoe Saldana, Lennie James, Cliff Curtis, Jordi Mollà, Beto Benites

Length: 1h 48m

Synopsis: An assassin named Cataleya (Saldana), who is alarmingly proficient at her job, has been making her mark on the victims of her last couple dozen “assignments,” leaving a calling card meant to catch the attention of a certain someone from her past. That person is Don Luis (Benites), who when Cataleya was a child ordered to have her and her parents murdered. Narrowly escaping her own hit, Cataleya has dedicated the twenty years since to seeking revenge on Don Luis, receiving special training from her connected uncle Emilio (Curtis). The Don has in fact finally noticed Cataleya’s handiwork, but so too has the FBI. The driven avenger is now tasked with making good on her vengeance without being caught by the authorities or killed by the Don’s protectors. To her credit, neither deterrent is threatening to quell her earnestness. Read the rest of this entry »

What could "The Expendables" teach us, besides why you don't want to pick a fight with any of them?

Back at the beginning of Summer we gave a preview of three films that were to come out that have something in common. What these films share is a focus on a tight-knit group of ex-military soldiers who work towards a shared goal of some kind. With The Losers it was about getting revenge, with The A-Team it was about living up to one’s duties as a patriot, and with The Expendables it was about serving the human condition. As you may have noticed, the motivations of the groups got progressively nobler, from serving selfish incentives to fulfilling an intangible obligation to heroic morals; namely the moral that the strong have to protect the weak. The three movies, and by extension the three groups in these movies, may share a similar basic premise, and may interact within their respective contexts in a similar way, but their differing motivations distinguish them from each other more so than we may have anticipated. Likewise, they also shared more in common than we previously thought. What exactly, though, can we learn from comparing them further?

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Short Take: Decently entertaining, but largely disappointing

Director: Sylvester Stallone (Rambo)

Screenwriters: Dave Callaham (Doom), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky franchise)

Cast: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Jason Satham (Crank: High Voltage), Jet Li (The Forbidden Kingdom), Giselle Itie, Eric Roberts (The Dark Knight), Dolph Lundgren (Rocky IV), Mickey Rourke (Iron Man 2), Terry Crews (Idiocracy), Randy Couture, Steve Austin (The Longest Yard)

Length: 1h 43m

Synopsis: A group of mercenaries are offered a job by the CIA to kill a warlord that has taken over the island country of Vilena. The mercenaries know that the CIA is hiring them instead of doing the dirty work themselves because if things would happen to go wrong then news of the fact that an ex-CIA agent was part of the warlord’s inner circle would leak out. Meanwhile, in the process of tackling this thorny mission the mercenaries get entangled with a woman who is part of the island’s underground resistance against the warlord, and as it turns out her predicament is far more personal than they could have known. Despite lacking confidence that they can succeed in this tremendous undertaking by themselves the mercenaries decide to take the moral high ground and do the dutiful. Now all they have to do is survive. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Solid action - solid story - solid movie

Director: Joe Carnahan (Smokin’ Aces, Narc)

Screenwriters: Joe Carnahan (Narc), Skip Woods (Swordfish), Brian Bloom

Cast: Liam Neeson (Taken), Bradley Cooper (The Hangover), Jessica Biel (Powder Blue), Sharlto Copley (District 9), Patrick Wilson (Watchmen), Quinton “Rampage” Jackson

Length: 1h 57m

Synopsis: Four ex-Army Rangers meet coincidentally (named Hannibal (Neeson), Face (Cooper), Murdock (Copley), and B.A. Baracus (Jackson)) and form a tight-knit group dubbed the Alpha Team when they reinstate themselves back into the armed forces. Several years pass and their specialty becomes accomplishing seemingly impossible missions, which come around somewhat regularly. During one of these missions things get irrevocably out of control, and the team is framed for and convicted of treachery. Disbanded and incarcerated, the team must find a way to get back together and clear their names by figuring out who crossed them and how to bring them to justice. Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Fun, but ultimately superficial

Director: Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard)

Screenwriters: Peter Berg (Very Bad Things), James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, Basic)

Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Taking Woodstock, Watchmen), Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Star Trek), Chris Evans (Sunshine), Jason Patric (Narc)

Length: 1h 38m

Synopsis: A smoking aces U.S. special ops team gets double-crossed during a routine mission in Bolivia, and as a result they get the blame for the deaths of over two dozen innocent children. After faking their deaths to escape the CIA they work towards finding a way to get back to the states, but money is tight and options are limited. Opportunity finally knocks in the form of a mysterious woman with wealth, connections, and a serious attitude. Once back in America the group makes it a point to hunt down the person(s) responsible for framing them. Read the rest of this entry »

This year's version of The A-Team may be part of a new team trend for on-screen heroes

This upcoming summer movie season there are three movies that will be about a group of well trained special ops-type fighters who don’t “play by the rules,” starting with this weekend’s The Losers. This film, inspired by the comic book series of the same name, deals with a group of individual CIA black ops operatives who band together to find and kill whoever betrayed them and left them for dead. The other two films similar to this are The A-Team and The Expendables. The former is, if you don’t know already, based off of the TV series of the same name that first aired in 1983 about four ex-military men who were framed for a crime they didn’t commit and go about trying to clear their names, and the latter deals with a group of mercenaries hired to overthrow the vicious dictator of the small South American country of Vilena.

Well what’s so interesting about the fact that these films are releasing within a couple months of each other? Everyone one knows that Hollywood is a copycat town, right? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, studios like to hang their hats on proven formulas and trends, but that some trends appear at all is often reflective of the cultural mood of our country. Over the past few years there has been a heavy influx of films dealing with individual heroes, many of them being of the “super” variety. But aside from Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and Iron Man, there were John McClain, Rambo, Indiana Jones, and James Bond. Obviously, none of these rogue stand-alone men did everything by themselves (Batman had Alfred, Iron Man had Pepper Pots, James Bond had MI6, etc.), but by and large they did all of the most difficult and dangerous things by themselves. Americans love heroes that are individualistic and autonomous. They’ve loved them like that for decades and will continue to love them for decades more. What seems so peculiar about The Losers, The A-Team, and The Expendables being released in one summer season, then, is that the team concept stands out so sharply from this crowd of actioners.

These three movies are hardly pioneering new ground, of course, as the X-Men trilogy made the point during the middle of the first super hero wave of the new century that working as a team for a common goal is the real and only way to make progress. However the three films in question seem to have their sights set a lot lower than achieving social understanding and ridding the world of prejudice. In the case of The Losers, for example, the goal is simply to get revenge on the group’s would-be assassinators. So, because the scope is miniscule and the benefits gained from the group’s success are specific to just them, the individualistic sense is still ever-present. And, the same might be said of The A-Team as well. Because the goal in The Expendables is to overthrow a dictatorship it can be argued that the benefits of the heroes victory would not be exclusive to just them but would also include the entire citizenship of Vilena. So, you could say the sense of individual empowerment would at least not be the same variety found in the other two films. However, it is interesting to point out that The Expendables are a group made up of mercenaries, who are a breed of people not known for their team mentalities.

What do you all make of this? Is the concept of working as a team against evil going to become the new wave in action movies, or is it just a phase? Do you expect to see these films come close to enjoying the type of success that Iron Man 2 will no doubt garner? Which type of hero do you emulate the most? Which do you enjoy watching the most? Voice your opinions and let it be known what you think a true hero really is.

We’ll revisit this topic once all three films have been released (which will be mid-August) and ask you these same questions again. Then we’ll compare your responses to try and come to some sort of conclusion. Till then, just enjoy the movies!

Zoe Saldana ("Avatar," "Star Trek") in Warner Bros.' "The Losers" - Opens April 23rd

IGN.com published a set visit article yesterday about their trip to Puerto Rico where Warner Bros. is currently filming The Losers, based on the Vertigo graphic novels of the same name. The high-octane action film is being directed by Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) and stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen), Zoe Saldana (Avatar), and Chris Evans (Sunshine).

The story is about a former CIA black ops team that got double-crossed and tries to get revenge. The part of that story that IGN walked in on is the ending, which according to the article will supposedly entail a plethora of gunfire (naturally). Grasping the tone and style of the film was not easy for some of those involved, apparently because the story mixes moments of sincere drama with one-liners and gags. Chris Evans explains how he first reacted to the script.

“I just knew that Peter Berg wrote it, it was Warner Bros., it was a war-type movie,” Evans recalls. “And by page 20 I was a little confused as to what they were going for. Because there were a lot of jokes. There were times of high drama, shootouts and someone’s cracking a line. And I said, ‘What is this?’ Because I think nowadays we want … Bourne Identity . You want very raw, very real, very authentic stuff. And the days of the Die Hards and Lethal Weapons, those movies where there was room for some humor, you don’t see a lot of them. So I put the script down on page 30 and I called my agent and I said, ‘What is this? What am I missing? I’ve got to go back and start over and get the right tone in my head. I’m not thinking clearly on it.’ And he said, ‘This is Joel Silver. It’s based on a graphic novel. Why don’t you read the graphic novel first, then crack the script?’ So I went back and started over and it made a whole lot more sense. And I really, actually thought, ‘You know what? There’s room for this.’” – movies.IGN.com

The article as a whole provides a number of details, none of which would likely be considered spoiling. Those details, though, are mostly on the level of tidbits, failing to indicate much besides how difficult it is to shoot an action movie. As someone who still has yet to look into the graphic novel series, a rudimentary exploration into any of the characters or discussion with the director about what he’s aiming to accomplish would have helped. Besides these shortcomings it should prove to be an interesting read for those anticipating the release of The Losers, which opens April 23rd.