There once was an ops team called Losers

Altho this is based on a comic

It's more like an old-school action flick

With lots of explosions

And brain cell erosion

It's fun but also dumb as a brick.

Some stuff always gets lost when translating books (even the comic kind ;) to the big screen. The original Losers comic was not a sacrosanct masterpiece by any means, but the movie version is missing the book's edge. Losing the R-rated language to gain a PG-13 audience isn't a big deal, but shaving the interesting off a couple of characters hurts and switching between slo-mo and hypertime shots doesn't quite capture the comic's visual style. For a bit of comparison, here's the comic version of the poster:

The movie's credits are executed with similar artistic flair, and they serve as a final reminder of why the rest of the film feels a little ordinary. Perhaps it could've used some 300-style digital grading to give it some style, because mostly it comes off as the ode to 80s action movies that Cop Out tried to be. But the real loss is Zoe Saldana's character Aisha, sanitized from an unhinged force of nature killer to a sassy gunslinger with a penchant for Flashdance shirts.

So, taking off my "the comic was better" hat for a moment, is the flick any fun? Yeah – some.

It's a very simple tale of revenge – a Special Ops team gets blamed for a mission going wrong and consequently burned by the CIA. After a few months of everyone thinking they're dead, the Losers gear up and strike back at the main villain, a mysterious man named Max that wanted them out of the way. And that's basically it – there's some nonsense about "snukes," a mythical bomb that sucks everything in its path into a wormhole of sorts by way of questionable CGI, but it's an obviously shoehorned-in plot that exists purely to give the Losers a vaguely heroic image.

This is the kind of movie where instead of driving around an obstacle, a henchman drives his Ducati up a previously unseen ramp to leap over a plane. The kind of movie where the two main characters decide whether they can trust each other by brutally fighting and setting the room on fire before having sex. The kind of movie where a guy gets shot in both legs, makes many jokes about the fact that he can't stand up because he's been shot in both legs, then eventually stands up just fine on both legs... when he needs to shoot people. And so on.

So if you put your brain on the back burner, it's not half bad, but at best it's only half good.