Rating: 3.25 of 5  

damn that was cool! I admit I went in with low expectations. Comic book movie, probably some graphic violence, very little story and hollow characters, right?! But The Losers is smart and funny and sleek and very, very cool.

I mean, this is how a comic book movie should look. The editing is fast, the shots are stylized, the directing was really interesting without being so over the top that it was distracting. Everything is a little surreal but just grounded in enough reality to suspend your disbelief. The fight scenes were fast and sleek, the gun shots piercing, the explosions kinda brilliant; great color, great looks for the characters. All the elements of the film were really well done and heightened the tone of the movie and made it very cool.

And it was fun. There wasn’t a lot of blood or crude elements. Except for one fairly tame sex scene and a high body count it fits a PG13 rating. And I really liked that about it. I like comic book movies, but I don’t like that they feel the need to be graphic with the blood and the violence and the sex and everything. This has action and hard hitting fights but it’s fun.

And it’s also funny. I think that was really the unexpected strength of the film: it’s a very cynical movie in a very funny way which makes it basically perfectly written for right now. It’s how your friends talk or how they would talk if they had that much sardonic wit to spare. And the actors take this sparse dialogue and give it energy and a playful edge. All of them own their characters so well that you believe the movie and can then revel in how cool everything looks.

Everything about this movie works. except how the studio under marketed it, didn’t understand their demographic enough to show them what a cool movie it is and so let it fall by the wayside. It’s a great opening to the summer movie season that speaks directly to the zeitgeist.

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