So now we see why Chris Evans, the onetime Johnny Storm of The Fantastic Four, was selected to play Captain America in the upcoming Avengers comic book epic. The Losers was his audition. 
 
 Evans steals The Losers, another comic book adaptation about a team of “black ops” agents out for revenge on the fellow who betrayed them, As Jensen, the wise-cracking, parkour practicing computer specialist, Evans bops and riffs in the best combat comic book tradition. 
 
 “My favorite part was when we were completely on fire. But the shoot? That was good times.” 
 
 Sent by Clay, the leader of The Losers (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) to retrieve a hard drive from a villain’s corporate lair, Evans dons bike messenger gear, plugs in an iPod and bounces his way past security, singing a certain Journey hit in high falsetto. 
 
 “Juuuuust a small-town giirrrrrrllll…” 
 
 The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment. 
 
 If The A-Team is half this much fun, they’ll be lucky. 
 
 The mysterious Max is the guy who hangs The Losers out to dry in Bolivia. Thus, Jensen, Clay, the knife-fighter Roque (Idris Elba at his most charismatic), Cougar the super-sniper (Oscar Jaenada) and Pooch (Columbus Short, funny) the driver are stranded in South America. 
 
 Aisha (Zoe Saldana, sexy as all get out) is the lethal stranger who tracks them down and offers them the chance for revenge. But not before she brawls with Clay, roughly thrice her weight. 
 
 “I don’t want to hurt you,” she hisses. 
 
 “You’re not going to.” 
 
 “Oh yes I am!” 
 
 And Max? He’s played with a cast-against-type glee by Jason Patric, who does Slumdog Millionaire jokes (in accent) with the Indians who supply his new super-weapon and wears a assorted stylish gloves over one hand, Michael Jackson style. 
 
 Losers is a PG-13 action film – so the blood, profanity and sex are discreet. Director Sylvain White (he did Stomp the Yard with Short) keeps it loose and jokey, referencing the comic books and skipping by the silly plot. He also has to battle Morgan’s lack of charisma (Elba chews him up in their scenes together). Morgan’s expected easy journey from Grey’s Anatomy to the movies has been filled with flops, unreleased films and Watchmen. He seems downhearted. 
 
 But Captain America Evans fills in some of that void with a cat-got-the-canary performance that screams “Don’t stop believin’.”“ 
 
 See for Yourself 
 
 The Losers 
 
 Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba, Chris Evans 
 
 Director: Sylvain White 
 
 Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes 
 
 Industry rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, a scene of sensuality and language. ||||| The Losers, Not a Winning Comic-Book Thriller 
 
 Writer Andy Diggle dedicated his snappy DC comic books "The Losers" to 80s screenwriting superstar Shane Black, creator of the Lethal Weapon series. But in adapting "The Losers" for film, director Sylvain White and screenwriters James Vanderbilt and Peter Berg strain to achieve the pleasurable mix of cheap laughs and expensive action that Lethal Weapon pulled off effortlessly with the help of its stellar cast. (In a remarkable example of an actor finding his ideal role, Gary Busey played LW's haywire, half-cocked villain.) What they've produced instead is a busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, poorly acted by a grab bag of new faces and franchise movie refugees, and set to a hard-rock soundtrack. 
 
 The Losers opens with its eponymous team of Special Forces ops staking out a drug lord's South American compound, preparing for attack. The inconveniently timed arrival of a busload of children provides both an opportunity for our heroes to show their nobility, and a herd of adorable sacrificial lambs to set the movie's plot shuddering ahead. One smoldering teddy bear later, the Losers are presumed deadand loaded for revenge on the shadowy figure who tried to take them out. (Oh, and killed 25 children.) 
 
 Who is that shadowy figure? Why, it's Max, played by Jason Patric, about whom it must be said: He's no Gary Busey. While that is a great comfort, I'm sure, to Patric's neighbors, it's little help to the movie. Max has a deep tan, ties to the CIA, and an interest in a very fake-seeming weapon called a "snuke" (a sonic nuke, obviously). Max swans around a number of exotic locales, occasionally killing some poor soul for sport, but Patric plays his scenes so ineptly (often for laughs, but he's bad at comedy) that Max becomes an object of scorn rather than, as is proper in any good action movie, of fascination. He wears a single white glove! He makes Slumdog Millionaire jokes to his Indian weapons designers! His character is a mishmash of bad ideas, and Patric lacks the charisma to bring any of them to life. 
 
 Details The Losers 
 
 Directed by Sylvain White 
 
 Warner Bros. 
 
 Opens April 23 
 
 
 
 In the face of this unworthy adversary, we're dependent on our heroes to carry the movie. But only one of them shows real signs of life. Idris Elba, as the scar-faced Roque, acts as the group's voice of reason and is the only character whose surface coolness peels back to reveal hidden depths. The rest are just types. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen) is the cocksure leadera meatier, less nimble Robert Downey Jr. Chris Evans (Fantastic Four) is the smart-ass computer expert, who wears stupid T-shirts and makes the ladies swoon. Columbus Short and Óscar Jaenada barely make an impression as, respectively, the garrulous family man and the silent sniper. 
 
 And then there's Zoe Saldana, whoas Uhura in Star Trek and Neytiri in Avatarshowed herself to have relatively good taste in blockbusters. It fails her here, and her character, an Agency asset named Aisha, is a disaster, especially compared to the Aisha that Diggle dreamed up for his comics series. I'm not one to demand that comic-book movies remain utterly faithful to their source material; such unyielding fealty sure didn't do Watchmen any favors. And anyway, Diggle's Losers is a lark, not a classicfrom its first issue, it was begging for the Hollywood treatment. But it would be nice if full-scale character rewrites made characters better, not lamer. In the comic, Aisha is intimidating, complicated, and spooky, a native Afghan whose childhood battles with Soviet soldiers gave her a taste for blood. In the movie? She's a sexpot who wears red leather pants (or, during shootouts, her underwear). The comics' biz has always written oversexualized, underdeveloped female characters. In The Losers, Hollywood manages to out-comic the comics. ||||| ‘The Losers’’ is another plastic thingamabob that’s been hoisted up by one of those carnival claw machines. The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed. It’s based on a comic book from one of DC’s offshoots, and the director, Sylvain White, does everything he can to approximate the unreality of certain comic book titles. In an early sequence, the film’s gang of CIA-contracted mercenaries ambushes a bad guy’s Bolivian compound. The bullets hit bodies, the bodies wrench, and the frame freezes. Rinse and repeat. 
 
 The quintet of mercenaries is introduced in close-ups that hold long enough for the live-action to burst into a comic book sketch that prints the character’s nickname and function. So it’s clear the actors playing these men — Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Idris Elba, Chris Evans, Columbus Short, and Oscar Jaenada — will live and die based on their ability to riff on one note. (Evans and Short prove budding maestros at this.) 
 
 The movie looks bright and feels manic. It’s going for “thwap,’’ “pow,’’ and “bam.’’ The images in the frame speed up and slow down. And very few shots last longer than two or three seconds. Like nearly all action movies, horror films, and thrillers in the last 15 years, a sense of motion is conveyed predominately with editing as opposed to through physical space. The compression of time, distance, and movement into hectic cuts is deadening. This was a style of storytelling perfected by the editor Dede Allen, who died last week. Her work — “The Hustler,’’ “Bonnie and Clyde ’’ and “Dog Day Afternoon,’’ for example — could be swift, but it was always soulful, never losing a story or the energy that drives it forward. This new mode of editing, what the film scholar David Bordwell has called “intensified continuity,’’ stampedes over both natural spatial relations and cinematic ingenuity. 
 
 Things move fast in “The Losers,’’ but nothing feels urgent. The movie revolves around the men’s hunt for the corrupt boss (Jason Patric) who betrayed them, and the sex bomb-assassin-mystery woman (Zoë Saldana) who promises to lead them to him. Maybe I’m waiting for a version of this to happen all over again in this summer’s “The A-Team’’ makeover, but I didn’t care whether these guys found their target. Neither, really, does the film, which was co-written by the actor and director Peter Berg, whose propulsive, virile moviemaking (“The Rundown,’’ “Friday Night Lights,’’ “The Kingdom’’) White emulates. 
 
 But jokiness rots the thrill. Patric thinks his dapper, oily villain is better than it actually is. He’s just doing Gene Hackman in “Superman.’’ As with “Kick-Ass’’ and Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,’’ heavy artillery in “The Losers’’ is deployed for comedy. When a cornered Evans points his fingers like a gun and squeezes, the guards who surround him fall down. Until a sniper’s assistance is confirmed, it looks like magic. 
 
 The movie is more persuasive tussling and shooting than it is trying to connect with people. Anyway, we see Morgan and Saldana connecting principally through brute force. We’ve reached a point in American movies where violence is the new sex. Once upon a time, when, say, the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was one of Hollywood’s most lucrative viruses in the 1980s and early ’90s, most violence was graphic and merely lewdly suggestive. When Sharon Stone wanted sex, she strapped Michael Douglas to her bed. 
 
 Gradually, depictions of sex declined while a new type of violence seemed to flourish. The Ezsterhas era, which saw a rise in the number of mysteriously dangerous women, peaked by 1992 and the Quentin Tarantino period began. Tarantino wrote parts for women. Sometimes men hit those women. And Tarantino being a kind of revenge feminist found ways for the women to hit back. In everything from “Charlie’s Angels ’’ and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith ’’ to Tarantino’s two “Kill Bill ’’ movies, women and men fight each other with mutual delight. 
 
 A movie like “The Losers,’’ which unbelievably enough is rated PG-13, sees this to its logical end. Morgan and Saldana punch each other silly. She throws him into a wall. He returns the favor. Her legs wind up wrapped around him. He winds up underneath her. Depending on where you stand, the ubiquity of all the red in the room signals either romance or sadism. But it’s more inane than hot — and predicted years ago by David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.’’ Morgan and Saldana’s actual love scenes are paint-drying affairs by comparison. Rough stuff is the only intimacy this movie knows. Forget condoms. Wear Kevlar. 
 
 Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 
 
 © Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company. ||||| Thousands of Hummers, helicopters, hot cars, houses, hotels and humans — well, actors playing humans — were sacrificed to make "The Losers" what it is: a violent, bloody mess.For the action-loving comic-book fans the film has in its sights, just one word:There are burning fragments of what passes for a story flying around everywhere in the massive debris field that is "The Losers."There's a full metal jacket of pounding sound, blood, fireballs, mayhem, double-crosses and the entire future of the U.S. of A. on the line. But the plot? Who decided to kill the plot?Screenwriters Peter Berg, of the excellent "Friday Night Lights," and James Vanderbilt, of the tightwire thriller "Zodiac," seem to have lost their moorings here, along with director Sylvain White.Bummer. The film had promising roots in the comic book's band of irreverent brothers created in the '40s during WWII then reborn into the 21st century as special ops bad boys in 2003 via writer Andy Diggle and artist Jock's DC/Vertigo series.There is charm aplenty in this scruffy bunch. Jeffrey Dean Morgan ( " Watchmen"), Chris Evans ("Fantastic Four"), Idris Elba ( " Obsessed"), Columbus Short ("Stomp the Yard") and Oscar Jaenada ("Che: Part Two") make up the CIA wolf pack forced to go rogue in the backwaters of Bolivia. The film gets a little Adrenalin shot every time they get to use some of it, which is not nearly enough.Meanwhile, Jason Patric as Max, who is suffering from a bad attitude and a receding hairline, does a very nice turn as the villain with the heart of cold, a mysteriously gloved hand and a teasing mince in his step."The Losers" opens with some questionable boom-boom in which 25 school kids and a teddy bear are blown to bits in a drug bust that goes wrong. It's a frame-up that leaves the Losers for dead. Actually, they're just lying low, passing time betting on cockfights and working in a Bolivian sweatshop that makes dolls destined for American toy shelves. It's a slooooow start as the boys wonder if they'll ever make it back home.Instead of ruby slippers, which wouldn't fit the mood as surreal as it is, they get Zoe Saldana's Aisha, who turns up like a bad penny in a black hat. Finally, some real action and a ticket back home that includes payback for Max.This chick's all fight as foreplay, slinking around in "action wear," which I believe is really just a splash of body paint, a belt and some boots. By the way, apparently those long legs that were blue in "Avatar" are hers and not a special effect.The opening violent coupling between Aisha and Clay (Morgan) involves a brutal Tarantino-esque ballet of whirling kicks and bruising chops, all delivered with camera moves that would make Linda Blair's head spin faster than the devil. It also brings "The Losers" some measure of redemption.From this point on, there are enough clever bits, in that exploding-bodies kind of way, to inject some fun into the party. White and director of photography Scott Kevan, who collaborated on "Stomp the Yard," have some seriously inventive visuals, which at times are smash-cut fabulous.Morgan brings his swag, his 5 o'clock shadow and his sentimentality to Clay, which is really enough for most Morgan fans. Evans as the computer buff who's actually is buff, and briefly in the buff, has one of the funniest bits — it involves pizza, an iPod, an elevator and over-exposure. In fact, just about every character in "The Losers" has promise.Now if only they can locate that plot in case there's a sequel.
– The Losers has some bright spots, but overall the new comic book adaption is a muddled mess of CIA intrigue, uneven acting, wall-to-wall violence, and Zoe Saldana in her underwear. Some critical reactions: "The film had promising roots in the comic book's band of irreverent brothers," Betsy Sharkey writes for the LA Times. "But the plot? Who decided to kill the plot?" "The Losers is another plastic thingamabob that’s been hoisted up by one of those carnival claw machines," Wesley Morris writes for the Boston Globe. "The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot." The producers' ambitions were in the right place, but a Lethal Weapon-style romp is beyond their reach. "What they've produced instead is a busy, unsatisfying comic thriller, a grab bag of new faces and franchise movie refugees," Dan Kois writes for the Village Voice. The prize in the grab bag is Chris Evans, Roger Moore writes for the Orlando Sentinel. "Now we see why Evans was selected to play Captain America in the upcoming Avengers comic book epic."