Maybe it’s a good thing that I’ve fallen behind on my Crisis on Infinite Comic Book Adaptations five parter (part one is here; part two is here) – I hadn’t yet gotten to Vertigo action comic The Losers, and my delay means that I can talk about it with the knowledge that a director has been attached.
Sadly, that director is Tim Story, a guy who wouldn’t normally be in a sentence that also includes the words ‘good’ and ‘director.’ That means Peter Berg won’t be helming, which makes sense, since I think this iteration of The Losers – a gritty special ops thriller* – is sort of tonally similar to his upcoming The Kingdom. Berg’s still on as a producer (likely in name only), and his draft of the script is being used by new writer Jamie Vanderbilt, who wrote Zodiac, so no complaints on this end.
Story’s another… story. Sorry. Anyway, his involvement bodes less than well – I found his Fantastic Four to be enjoyable but often generic. I won’t be seeing the second film until this Thursday (Fox graciously got me into a press screening hours before the public ones. Thanks!), so I can’t tell you if he’s grown. I somehow doubt it. The Losers could be OK as a standard action thriller – Story will probably shake his camera and adjust the film speed so we see every speck of dirt in an explosion. You know, how every other director does it now – but it could be something much, much more interesting. Or it could have been.
*There’s more to it than that. The special ops team gets left for dead by their handlers after a mission and engage in a protracted (in the comics, anyway. It’ll take about two hours or less in the movie) war of vengeance, uncovering corruption and evil in the government. Which I think means they watch C-SPAN.