The Losers: Critic Reviews

Basically, it's The A-Team meets Rambo meets Mission: Impossible, with a mission that's one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up.

The manufacturer's date might be relatively recent, but almost all the ideas and moves are definitely older than the likable cast members.

Only the strangely coy approach to violence (deaths are nearly all offscreen), leaves an odd aftertaste, but not enough to taint the big dumb fun.

Though they have plenty of lethal weapons at their disposal, the Losers are nowhere near as fun as the '80s action-flick heroes they emulate.

How dumb is it? You might actually kill a few million brain cells just watching it. Some groups may even want to consider inviting a designated driver to sit in the lobby and eat popcorn till it's over.

Like nearly all action movies, horror films, and thrillers in the last 15 years, a sense of motion is conveyed predominately with editing as opposed to through physical space. The compression of time, distance, and movement into hectic cuts is deadening.

Director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and expensive action that Lethal Weapon pulled off effortlessly with the help of its stellar cast.

The Losers is simply a lot of low blows, telegraphed each and every time.

An aptly titled, grossly overdone big-screen adaptation of a DC Comics publication, it is, as though we needed it, another symptom of where we're going cinematically, and a movie that takes bilious joy in its own soullessness.

Compensates for the mindlessness of its story by filling it with all kinds of clever, playful, stylish flourishes.

There is plenty of good-guys-vs.-rotten-apple tension here.

"The Losers" is exactly what you would hope for from an action film: a wham-bam-glitz-and-glam good time with two-fisted action and brains to boot ...

The movie gets the job done, and the actors show a lot of confidence in occupying that tricky middle ground between controlled satire and comic overkill. It's fun.

The film is easier to take than, say, Kick-Ass or V for Vendetta, both of which came to the screen saddled with misguided pretentions. No pretentions here.

Though rigidly formulaic, the movie is undeniably good-humored.

The script is boilerplate, the wit pretty much witless.

The Losers does a perfectly serviceable job of achieving its low ambitions.

Staying awake during this ordeal of incompetent, incomprehensible stupidity is not difficult. It's so noisy that you can hear it in the next town. Staying interested is something else entirely.

The Losers is the sort of pyro-heavy exercise parodied in Tropic Thunder, and no amount of production polish can hide the hollowness beneath its junk-food high.

The movie, based on a comic book, features a couple of actors who deserve better (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba) and some who deserve even worse (like Chris Evans).

If The A-Team is half this much fun, they'll be lucky.

The Losers at least has speed on its side -- not to mention a bad case of ADD and camera jitters -- but all compliments end there.

Movies aren't loaded weapons, though sometimes, they do go off when their users aren't careful.

An action film designed for those suffering from ADD.