by Fred Topel
The Losers is going to benefit a lot from Chris Evans' recent casting as Captain America. It's a cool comic-book-style action movie for sure, and one of the things that makes it so cool is that The Losers makes a strong case for Evans as Cap.
The Losers are a team of black-ops soldiers who are betrayed on a mission and left for dead. A mysterious stranger offers them a chance to get back in the game and clear their names. Covert missions, tactical espionage, high-tech weapons, blah blah blah. They banter and kick some butt and it's fun.
Evans plays Jensen, the wisecracking hacker type. It's a standard role in a ragtag gang of action heroes, but Evans elevates it beyond one-liners. He can have fun with comic-book situations but stay out of the wink-wink territory. The Losers find themselves in some crazy situations, and Jensen's the first to say something funny about it.
That's good. We want there to be humor with Steve Rogers. He's not quite the brooding Dark Knight type. We just don't want him to be the goofy Human Torch type. The Losers shows he knows the difference and he'll play it cool, and it'll work. Evans can be funny and keep you believing that he's taking out security guards with finger guns or singing Journey while going undercover.
His interaction with the group bodes really well for The Avengers. Once Evans gets his own movie as The First Avenger: Captain America, he's going to have to play with the others. In The Losers, he relishes the hell out of his individual moments, but he lets the other guys have theirs. He doesn't need to hog the spotlight when he's already got the best lines. He can let those simmer while other people do their scenes.
Evans can handle the action, but of course we've seen that before. I've always thought he could bring a certain reality to the crazy material in action movies, whether it's the high-concept Cellular or the genre formula Push. Neither of those movies stood out, but you believed Evans in them. He was clearly having the right amount of fun in the Fantastic Four movies. The Losers is good enough material to elevate him out of the sort of "working actor you kind of recognize" category. He's already got the part, but The Losers would be the right audition for A-list action movies. You know, the kind with explosions AND stories.
And really, just superficially, but maybe most importantly, the man is totally ripped. There's a scene where he's changing in an elevator, and his T-shirt is slicked to his chest like latex and he's just bursting out of it. This is just for a regular movie. Imagine when he trains for Captain America. He's got the body of a comic-book character, and as much as you guys might pretend you're not looking, he's buff and he'll fill that costume.
So if you're worried about whether Evans is right to play Steve Rogers, go see The Losers. Then stop worrying.
Source: scifiwire.com
