The Losers - Movie Review

**1/2
Starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, Jason Patric and Oscar Jaenada.
Directed by Sylvain White.

This is a warm-up to the A-Team movie. It's a droll little actioner about a group of specialists that get framed and have to pretend they're dead. Based on a grapic novel, it has the whiz-bang dialogue in between shoot-outs, bar fights, and the occasional senseless killing. It also explains the wardrobe changes or lack thereof. No matter what Clay is doing, he always seems to wind up back in a suit with his shirt untucked.

For me, the brainless action was fine but not really engaging til we got to the second half. You've seen the sequence in the preview when Jensen (Chris Evans) pulls out his fingers pretending they're real guns. In the movie, that is a great scene, the first one where I sat up and took notice. They played Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" in the chase scene leading up to it, and it made me wonder if it had been selected due to some scientific study done that concluded the most effective nostalgia song.

This is a movie where bandaging a wound eventually heals it, and where the sharpshooter is SO precise that it's amazing we don't hire this one guy to fight all our wars for us. Send Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) to Afghanistan with a sniper rifle and a canteen, and Al Qaeda will surrender within a week.