EW GRADE: C+

In the jungles of South America, a team of CIA black-ops agents is betrayed and left for dead. Only the five soldiers are very much alive, and they’re coming back for revenge. The Losers is a pulp action rouser based on a comic-book series, but it’s derivative of many other sources — basically, it’s The A-Team meets Rambo meets Mission: Impossible, with a mission that’s one part trickiness, four parts blowing stuff up. As Clay, the team leader, Jeffrey Dean Morgan has an amusingly rumpled, ordinary-schmo nonchalance. How tough is he? He’s so tough that when questioned, he punches out a fellow soldier played by the maximally intimidating Idris Elba (as the most insurrectionary of the team members). Jason Patric is also on hand as a supervillain out to hawk a terrorist weapon that can make a landmass implode, and Patric gives clipped, funny, furiously contained line readings; he wears bloodless misanthropy lightly (which is how it should be worn). But there isn’t enough invention or surprise to the rest of this relentless, numbing, bang-bang militia-fest, which hops from Bolivia to Dubai to Mexico to the concrete urban jungles of Miami and Los Angeles. As Clay’s love interest, Zoë Saldana, looking like a superskinny Beyoncé, is allowed to show the humor that Avatar squeezed out of her.

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