Review of The Losers (2010) by Chads. — 24 Apr 2010

Nobody is saying that Clay should undergo a nervous breakdown along the scale of a Martin Sheen in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now"(perhaps a "Self-Flagellation Later"), which would certainly be disproportionate in a no-frills action film based on an obscure DC comic book.

But for the sake of preserving some semblance to the real world(and actual human emotions), Clay, a former colonel in the CIA, needs to show some contrition, however obligatory or cliched such a gesture may seem.

For instance, Clay could wake up screaming in the dead of night after recounting the helicopter explosion that instantly killed a group of small children. But the mid-air massacre has no effect on the squad leader, nor his subordinates, as they carry out their mission with the usual nonchalance and grit so integral to the genre.

What happens in Bolivia, stays in Bolivia. Clay has only two things on his mind: get Max, and get laid, even though it's he who hands the chopper-bound children their death sentences after the yellow schoolbus that carried his unit and the young drug mules, nearly gets consumed by flames from the first of the movie's many explosions.

Maybe Clay f**** the pain away, or maybe he(and the screenwriters) just don't give a s*** about the welfare of South American children. "The Losers" doesn't have to take itself so seriously like a comic book movie such as Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight", by evoking Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter", but does it have to be this vapid, where the incinerated children are never properly mourned.