The Losers (4 out of 5)

The Losers is based on a comic book but it looks and feels more like an action movie. It’s big, loud, violent and dumb. God bless it. It recalls a time when action movies were allowed to be fun. Remember that? When they were just as much about personality as they were action, which The Losers has plenty of regardless? It has running, jumping, fighting, shooting, and, gasp, explosions that are created through the combination of gasoline, heat and oxygen, not a mouse and a keyboard. Remember that too? The Losers doesn’t go so far as to give rebirth to the classic days of the action hero, but it does manage to wrestle the genre away from the high tech, artificial flashes of light, sound and colour that have become a mainstay as of late and give it back to the characters who occupy it. Hey, it’s a start.

The Losers are a group of skilled military men, employed by the CIA to, oh I donno, kill bad guys. But when a mission is botched by an evil insider who goes by the name Max, the group pretends they are dead and set up shop in Bolivia where they hide away and live their new life. The team is made up of the leader Clay (Jeffery Dean Morgan), the tech guy Jensen (Chris Evans), the knife guy Roque (Idris Elba), the bomb guy Pooch (Columbus Short) and the marksman Cougar (Oscar Jaenada).

The team are getting along and getting by but deep down Clay wants to find Max and take him out for blowing up 25 innocent kids with a missile that was meant for him and his team. Max, it might as well be stated, when he finally appears, is played by one-time heartthrob turned character actor Jason Patrick who manages the wonderful feat of creating a completely original villain just through the nature of his presence. A lesser actor would have flown way over-the-top in the same role but Patrick always keeps both feet on the ground. He’s so good at creating evil men that he takes the role one step further into comedy instead making him both A) the film’s most amusing character and B) all the more shocking when his violence suddenly erupts.

Into the mix comes Aisha (Avatar’s Zoe Saladana) who hunts The Losers down in Boliva and is first mistaken for a foe so that, oh I donno, the film can justify burning down a hotel room. Fair enough. Turns out Aisha has one concern: killing Max. Why she wants to is unknown to the group but hey, she’ll cop the tab and they get their names cleared. Sounds good.

That’s the plot, the rest is all attitude. It’s kind of funny, kind of exciting, and all around, you know, kind of enjoyable in its glee for pulling out all of the stops for no better reason than to pull out all the stops. You’ve got to admire that. Action movies have been so mindless and hollow for so long that you’ve got to flag the ones with good senses about themselves. There’s a scene towards the end, during the big final shoot-out between Max and The Losers where a motorcycle becomes the prop at the centre of a wonderful action sequence. Many people who value their hearts and their minds will take issue with this. They’ll call it ridiculous. I don’t know, I call it kind of inspired because for one, there’s a certain danger, and therefore excitement, in ramping a motorbike off a high incline, second, motorbikes represent speed and speed somehow always translates into excitement and third, it’s something original. Good action movies take a certain degree of creativity to pull off successfully. The Losers has it to spare.

Maybe that has something to do with the script, which was written by that valuable subverter of genres Peter Berg whose own The Rundown was another staple of action filmmaking of the highest order. Heck, it may have been the last great Hollywood action movie. Here, like there, Berg creates actual characters out of personality types which is then elevated into fruition by the actors, while director Sylvain White goes into hyper-stylist overdrive trying to make everything look as delicious and exciting as possible. Sure, it’s trash, but it’s good trash and you know what Pauline Kael said: if we can’t enjoy good trash, why bother going to the movies in the first place?

Death at a Funeral (4.5 out of 5)

A reviewer should never be faced with the feeling that their review requires an apology and yet that’s just the sentiments I am faced with over my thoughts on Death at a Funeral. Nothing about this film should work: it’s a remake of a very very minor British film from 2007 that was directed by Frank Oz (the voice of Miss Piggy), it stars Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Tracy Morgan, whose names aren’t exactly associated with measures of cinematic quality and it was directed by Neil Labute who is a brilliant director, writer and playwright, but who usually focuses on dark films (often comedies) and shallow, wounded people. This movie has paycheque written all over it.

But here’s the thing: it’s funny as hell. It not only surpasses the original despite being almost an exact remake, but keeps on going until its memory is completely out of sight. Here’s proof that Godard may have actually been on to something when he said that the best way to criticize a film is to make another one.

Here’s the situation. A man has died and it is the day of his funeral. His family is gathering at his home where Aaron (Rock) is hosting. The eldest son, Aaron is worried that his eulogy will not be sufficient especially under the close scrutiny of those who believe his writer brother Ryan (Lawrence) should be giving it. Also around for the proceedings is the boys’ mother, a cousin played by Avatar’s Zoe Saldana whose father hates her white boyfriend Oscar (James Marsden) and would prefer she ended up with Derek (Luke Wilson) who is there with family friend Norman (Morgan) who is in charge of looking after grumpy old wheelchair-bound Uncle Russell (Danny Glover stealing the show). Also around is Frank (Peter Dinklage, reprising his role from the original) as a man with secrets from the father’s past.

See how they all connect like that? So does Labute who, like a brilliant stagehand orchestrates the ongoing slapstick comedy that arises out of the situation like a master conductor. Although the film forges on at full comedic tilt at all times, with several different subplots taking place around the house within the same temporal space, Labute never loses focus amidst the chaos. We always know that Oscar is in the backyard, Frank is in the guest room, Uncle Russell is in the bathroom, etc, with all of the threads building to an equal pitch so that the film not only stays its course, but never loses its momentum either.

The idea behind the film is that of classic screwball comedy. A man just wants to get through the day with as little problems as possible only to have everything go wrong from the beginning. And that’s the essence of the film’s comedic approach: just one damned thing after the other. That’s appropriate. It’s always better when it feels like funny things are happening as opposed to people trying to be deliberately funny. So Labute and his cast take full measures in pushing this situation to the very brink of its comedic potential. There are things in this movie that are vulgar, tasteless and at least one that is just plain wrong, but oh boy are they all ever funny. There’s something about this cast in this situation under the guidance of such an assured filmmaker that everything just clicks. Sometimes films succeed just on the basis that they find that special cocktail of elements and personalities that just go off and magic is born. That happened last year with The Hangover. Here it is again.

Another interesting aesthetic device that Labute employs is that he films many of the scenes in close-ups. It’s as if he understands the actors are funnier than the actions and so therefore focuses on the actors performing them instead of the gags themselves. That makes sense. Labute makes films about people and how they interact and influence each other. Screwball is such a broad generic convention that it can speak for itself, but by keeping the distance between audience and actor an intimate one, we not only focus on the individual, allowing several quick moments of humanity and sweetness to sneak through, but the comedy is played off of the reaction as much as the act itself. Take the James Marsden character, who gets himself into a predicament too funny to even hint at. The situation is inherently hilarious but the mileage that Labute gets off of Marden’s face is invaluable. Anyone could have filmed this same bit (and Oz did) at a medium or long distance and we would have laughed for a moment and then been tired with it. By keeping us close, Labute keeps our interests vested.

And then the film works because of how completely shameless it is willing to be: how far it is willing to go for a laugh and how many it actually gets in the process because of the strange logic every joke follows. Like The Hangover, there is nothing redeemable about this film: it has nothing to say about death, life, society, race, sex, religion, anything. All it wants is to be funny and it succeeds. I used to think that Neil Labute was only good at making Neil Labute films but with this, Lakeview Terrace and The Wicker Man it turns out he can make good films about just about anything, no apology required.