Grade: B

Summer is in the air: the days are longer and warmer, the tensions of school stress are finally starting to slacken, and (most crucial of all) Hollywood is starting to churn out mindless, explosive action movies every weekend. The Losers signals the beginning this years’ series of pumped, bullet ridden summer action blockbusters. It won’t redefine action movies or buddy/team movies, but the film’s self-awareness and fun qualities make it a perfect way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

We meet the fabled special-ops team, who’ve dubbed themselves the Losers, on a black-ops mission in Bolivia. When they choose to disobey orders in favor of their own morals, they are betrayed by a powerful C.I.A. operative known only as Max. Unable to return home or do anything that would reveal the fact that they survived this betrayal, the team is forced to remain in Bolivia until a mysterious and beautiful woman (aren’t they all?) named Aisha offers to get them back home to carry out their revenge on Max. For the rest of the film, the Losers blow up cars, pull off heists, shoot a platoon’s worth of hired mercenaries, get betrayed a couple more times for good measure, and blow up more explosives. They also manage to save the world along the way. What keeps this from being a typical stock action film and being enjoyable is that the film knows exactly what it is, and what its audience expects of it. As such, the movie doesn’t take itself seriously and blazes through with both intense action set pieces and witty dialogue to deliver one of the more enjoyable mindless action romps in the last few years.

The team is composed of Clay, the grizzled leader of the team; Roque, Clay’s brutal, no-nonsense second in command ; Pooch, the team’s transportation expert (a.k.a. designated driver) the only married man on the team; Cougar, the quiet, ladies man sniper; and Jenson, the geeky technical expert who tells all of the jokes. Sound a little familiar? It probably is, but the actors really bring the fun out of all these characters in such a way that it doesn’t matter how familiar it seems. They have a genuine chemistry that makes the action scenes that more fun to watch because the characters are enjoyable, much like the Lethal Weapon films.

Most out of place here is Zoe Saldana, still hot off the success of Avatar. As Aisha, she needs to be mysterious, seductive, and dangerous. However, it’s hard to look dangerous when you dress for your missions like a low-end JC Penny catalogue model and strut whenever you carry your bazooka. It becomes increasingly difficult to believe Aisha has the skills of her fellow black-ops teammates and that she has a dark past when she looks like she could have been raised  in Beverly Hills. While none of these types of action movies would be complete without at least one slinky femme fatale strutting around in her underwear while gunning down corrupt C.I.A. grunts, it feels as though the filmmakers had to include a “bad-ass chick” and also a “sexy chick” and maybe even a “thoughtful, more-than-meets-the-eye chick” and they decided to combine all of these into one character in order to economize. It doesn’t drag the film down, but the issue with her character is noticeably there.

The villainous Max, played by Jason Patrick, is a silly if typical action villain. He behaves like a kind of businessman, although he seems unaware that killing your employees AND your trading partners after every deal does not gain one good press. Besides betraying highly valuable and incredibly dangerous black-ops teams, Max’s agenda involves acquiring unbelievably destructive bombs to make fake wars so that…well, it’s really irrelevant what he uses them for, because the main point we as the audience need to get is that he’s bad, he does bad things, his badness must be stopped at all costs, kill him already.

The Losers will deliver on an action and dialogue level, if not a plausible and sophisticated level. But the film knows this, and doesn’t distract itself by taking any of the proceedings seriously. What’s left is the kind of action packed buddy cop movies of the 80s and 90s, minus the ridiculous hairdos.