Early yesterday, I went to see The Losers. Like Kick-Ass before it, this was based on a comic book/graphic novel and I must say that I have not read the comic so I won’t be judging how good this is in comparison to its source material. With Iron Man 2 coming out at the end of the week and this being a movie I’d been interested in seeing before its release, I figured this would be a decent stopgap between now and the release of Iron Man 2, which I’m hugely excited for. Having seen the reviews for this film, which weren’t exactly favorable, I went into it with lowered expectations. So, was the film a disappointment as the reviews would indicate or did I enjoy what I saw at the theatre? Read on to find out.

What The Losers does best is its unrelenting action. This has all the makings of the stereotypical summer blockbuster, meaning that it is very loud, fast paced and jammed full of high-octane action scenes. Explosions, gun battles, hand-to-hand fights and copious amounts of people dying are abundant in The Losers, as is commonly expectable from an action film of this caliber. True enough, non-stop action can be very tiring to watch over the span of an entire movie (see XXX) but with The Losers, the action was well paced as well as exciting, so I never felt fatigued while watching it.

As far as the plot and pacing are concerned, The Losers was incredibly predictable for the most part and I saw two of the film’s biggest plot twists coming from a mile away. The premise of the movie, which involves an evil mastermind who wishes to spark global conflict by obtaining and selling weapons of mass destruction to extremist groups, has been done before dozens of times but the execution here was good enough to make up for that.

Surprisingly, the actors and actresses themselves were pretty good as well. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana and Columbus Short were particularly notable for their respective roles and I particularly enjoyed seeing Chris Evans as the motor-mouthed Jensen and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Clay.  The only ones I was a bit disappointed with were the characters of Max and Wade, the former being the standard evil mastermind and the latter being the evil mastermind’s right hand man and their portrayals of both of these archetypes seemed a bit one-dimensional to me. Don’t get me wrong, Jason Patric was funny and entertaining as Max, but I felt that more could’ve been done with the role.

The Losers is an action film with touches of comedy here and there, to ensure that nothing is ever taken too seriously.  Occasionally its attempts at humor come off forced and contrived. For example, hearing a retort of “Yo’ mama was a pirate!” is not my idea of a quality joke. On the whole though, The Losers was a decently funny action film that makes up for its few comedic flubs with moments of genuinely hilarious comedy.

At the end of the day, I emerged from the theatre satisfied by what I saw. I expected an entertaining action film with a few dashes of comedy that would be conducive to shoveling handfuls of popcorn (or in my case, nachos) into my mouth and that’s exactly what I got. The Losers has a clear focus on what it wants to accomplish and does so fairly well. The Losers is, in a nutshell, a stereotypical summer blockbuster. In fact, I’m surprised it was released so early into the summer movie season as opposed to later. This is the type of movie you walk into, sit down with a big tub of popcorn on your lap and turn your brain off. In that capacity, The Losers works very well. While it certainly has its failings and likely won’t appeal to movie buffs (read: snobs), action junkies and fans of popcorn flicks should be plenty satisfied by The Losers.