Book Vs. Movie: The Losers
By Russ Bickerstaff
April 27, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
The Losers
The “living room war” had started in the mid-1960s. The Viet Nam conflict was brought directly into US homes via network news. Firsthand video of the frontlines made war very unpopular. By the 1970s, sales of G.I. Joe action figures had plummeted. War comics had to adapt or be snuffed-out entirely. Enter the Losers: a war comic whose very title suggested a much darker perception of the war. These were heroes, yes, but there was far less glorification of war than there had been in previous war comics. Characters who had been appearing in DC war comics throughout the ‘60s now had a darker home - which lasted until the series ran out of steam in the early ‘80s, just as the Reagan era saw somewhat darker glorifications of war in movies like Rambo and Red Dawn. G.I. Joe sales were back on top. Decades later, DC decided to go back to the Losers property via a comic book written by British comic book writer Andy Diggle. Re-envisioned in an era of modern covert warfare, the series ran for roughly two and a half years. Four years after the new series ended, Warner Bros. launched a film adaptation of Diggle’s series with some of Hollywood’s newest action stars. How does film stack-up to the series that inspired it?
The Series
Andy Diggle’s Losers was a socially conscious update on the 1970s comic book series set during World War II. Diggle's update brings the series into contemporary Iraq. The group in question is a special forces squad that has been double-crossed by a mysterious rogue government operative named Max.
The series runs a pretty clean 32-issue course that plays out over some two and a half years. Fans probably know for sure, but it’s likely that the series wasn’t envisioned as a 32-issue series. That being said, the story has a very clear arc that runs through a number of smaller chapters, culminating in the inevitable death of Max and subsequent disbanding of the squad. The series left no loose ends. Everything got wrapped-up quite nicely.
The story follows a group of easily-identifiable characters who all have very distinct personalities. Lt. Col. Franklin Clay is instantly recognizable in scruffy, swept-back hair, stubbly face and suit. He is the leader of the team. Corporal Jake Jensen is the hipster hacker, instantly recognizable by his Lennon-style frames, spiky hair and beard. Sgt. Carols “Cougar” Alvaarez is the quiet one - a Hispanic sniper in a cowboy hat. Sgt. Linwood “Pooch” Porteous is the African-American pilot, instantly recognizable by the fact that he is bald and black. And then there is Aisha, an Afghani loner who gives the team a certain amount of sex appeal. She is probably the single most original character in the series. The idea of a badass Afghani woman who dresses like a man and hangs out with the boys has an instant appeal to a relatively liberated America that views the treatment of women in countries like Afghanistan woefully behind the times. Under the Taliban, women were not allowed to attend university and forbidden to work outside the home. Being a vicious badass whom even the Losers can’t trust, Afghani Aisha comes across as something of a dream of feminist American comic book readers spoken through a British comic book author. The socio-political implications of the character are interesting, but don’t figure all that prominently into the series.
The story plays out over the course of five individual chapters that chart the squad’s journey over a good portion of the world. Though the overall story has a pretty clear beginning, middle and end, the series lacks a larger sense of structure that would suggest a clear vision for a 32 issue miniseries. Starting with the Ante Up chapter (in issues 1 -8) and following through to Endgame (in issues 26 -32,) the series lacks any coherent, overarching direction.
The story in Ante Up has a kind of earthbound grittiness that ends up being blown completely out of the water by the end of Endgame. Max’s ultimate vision of creating a single, global nation state seems a bit unrealistic considering his background, which firmly ties the villain into the very real and profoundly dark history of US black ops, shadowy foreign policy and sinister preoccupations of the CIA throughout the 20th century. While it’s nice to see some of the very real villainy of CIA influence oversees serve as the center of a popular piece of fiction, The Losers' lack of complexity compromises the very real concerns of U.S. foreign policy. It ends-up trivializing what the most important part of the story is trying to point out: the U.S. has done a lot of bad things to people over the years in its own best interest. The political implications of The Losers are lost in a shoddily rendered Hollywood-inspired action story.
As for the series’ primary artist “Jock,” the visual look of this early to-mid 2000s series looks a lot like a cross between the heavy ink work of an early ‘90s Mike Mignola, the sketchiness of that period’s Eddie Campbell and the overall dark stylishness of Timothy Bradstreet. While Jock is quite good at rendering a very iconic and distinct team, the action of the book feels very flat and static. When the action should be shooting across the page, it lays pretty flat, rendering a story as a series of well composed, but very lifeless, non-kinetic images. There are a few other artists who worked on the series, a few of them better than Jock, a few of them far worse. Visually, the series as a whole lacks a sense of consistency.
Overall, the 32 issues of the series would’ve made for kind of a strange narrative novel - not quite as long as Tom Clancy’s more voluminous work. It’s an interesting story in places. Those places happen to be very, very cinematic, which bodes well for a big-budget film adaptation...
The Movie
At first glance, The Losers should be a really easy comic book to adapt to film. Clearly inspired by a long line of squad-based military films, The Losers has framing, pacing, dialogue and mood drawn directly from Hollywood action movies. A quote from a review of the comic by Entertainment Weekly bleeds out white against a black background: "Hollywood-by-way-of-the-UK. Savvy…Vibrantly intense art . . . A-" Not more than half a year into its run and already the series gets compared favorably to Hollywood fare, so it makes sense that the series would be turned into a film.
Penned by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt, the movie adaptation of The Losers takes a small portion of the series (roughly the first six issues and bits of a few others) and renders them pretty competently for the screen without changing too much of what makes the series so appealing in the first place. The story jumps right into The Pass from issues 16 – 19. In the series, this was essentially back story - the initial tale of the team being double-crossed by Max. Rather than placing the story in Afghanistan, the film gives the Losers their origin in Bolivia. The change of scenery pulls the story quite solidly out of current headlines and give the atmosphere a more ambiguous seediness.
The events of the original six issues proceed to play out over the rest of the film with some considerable deviation. The most notable difference here is Aisha, who is played here by Zoe Saldana - a New Jersey native of Dominican/Puerto Rican descent. The change in Aisha’s nationality makes sense, but loses quite a bit of the cultural edge she had as an Afghani woman. When prompted, the character says she’s from North Africa. Saldana plays her as dangerous and mysterious, but she lacks the steely, quiet intensity of the Afghani character in the comic book. Here Aisha has access to funds that allow the squad to re-enter the US in an effort to track down Max.
The biggest success of film over the comic book has to be the interaction between squad members. Biggle is remarkably incompetent at rendering the overall social dynamic of the group, allowing much of that to fall to the leaden, iconic artwork of Jock. The ensemble assembled for the film does a really good job of fleshing out the social dynamic between members of the team. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a rugged charisma as Clay. Columbus Short brings a sympathetic affability to the pilot Pooch. Óscar Jaenada is appropriately quiet as Cougar. Chris Evans takes a relatively annoying hipster character and makes him probably the single most appealing guy in the film. As Jensen, Evans manages a great deal of savvy that continues to prove his abilities as a contemporary action star. One of the best scenes in the film features Evans as Jensen breaking into a corporate office to gain access to a hard drive. It’s taken straight out of the comic book, making it to the film pretty faithfully. Director Sylvain White brings it to the screen with added style, drawing-in an extended elevator trip to the office and bringing the action in and out with a cleverly incongruous use of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Really, if the rest of the film worked this efficiently, it would’ve been far superior to the comic book.
The problem, however, is that the film veers pretty far from particular brand of fanciful realism that defined the first few issues of the comic book, choosing instead to reach for some elements found at the end of the series - particularly a possible nuclear threat posed by Max - played here as a genuinely funny Jason Patric. It’s nice to see a villain who seems as appealing and savvy as the heroes who are after him, but the character is far too two-dimensional as a whole to come across with any depth.
The film ends making a pretty solid lead-in to a sequel. Theoretically, a lengthy three-part movie serial adaptation of the comic book series would be possible, but with work as solidly mediocre as this Losers film is, it hardly seems worth it. And certainly, after a sub-par opening weekend, the film seems destined to stand alone.
The Verdict
With iconic images and an exceedingly catchy premise, the comic book series had a great deal of appeal, but it had expended all of that appeal in its long, slow journey through 32 issues. Borrowing choice bits from the series and adding some of its own, the film has a very kinetic appeal that is completely lacking in the comic book.
Sadly, neither are completely satisfying, as the comic book series takes a very intriguing socio-political perspective and crams it rather uncomfortably into a action-adventure story that never really delivers on its politically savvy background. Having never really attempted to go into the politically savvy background, the film has an opportunity to be a fun straight-ahead action film, but it never really delivers on that potential. While certain scenes are brilliantly rendered and it’s fun to watch the ensemble interact with each other, the series never really builds-up enough momentum to overcome the inevitably cheesy Hollywood ending with an over-rendered villain. What begins as a ensemble action film ends as a particularly weak cross between James Bond and Mission: Impossible.