That’s not nostalgia you’re feeling from The Losers, the latest comic-book-dumbed-down-for-screen adaptation – in fact I’d be surprised if you felt anything at all. Can you feel for something so blatantly generic? Apparently not, since Losers only raked in about $9 million this past weekend at the box office. But we here at The Movie Banter don’t judge movies based on their profitable success alone (if we played by that rule we would have nearly hated Kick-Ass).

I can tell you The Losers was expected to receive an R-rating from the MPAA, but for some reason it settled on a PG-13. The graphic novel by Andy Diggle was hardcore enough for a stricter guideline. So why this agreement? Money, silly! Most targeted teens can’t get into an R-rated showing without a parent present. The Losers doesn’t suffer too much for this reason, though it suffers from many others. The screenplay by Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt seemed to have steered into a mainstream direction even before considering added sex and violence. I hear the comic is pretty raw. Alas even without reading it, as many others of its kind are, The Losers must have been flawed from the get-go. Instead of improving on a tainted yet interesting subject director Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) takes a page from the coloring book of action movies and turns this into something only people who use coloring books will be impressed by.

That being said The Losers isn’t as shameful as something from the horrid 2009 Hasbro flick G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra but by no means is it perfect. The intended summer fare follows a team of CIA black ops-turned-mercenaries after being left for dead during an operative. Jeffrey Dean Morgan front-runs The Losers and is perhaps the single reason I would suggest anyone see this. He’s made up in a black-and-white suit that accents his roguish charm perfectly. Give that man a gun? You have one awesome character. He seems to be the only aspect untouched by Hollywood egos, as the rest of this band of misfits is filled with no one particularly notable except for Chris Evans. Good or not The Losers is your unintentional first glimpse of Captain America himself, a role that you should pay closer attention to than you have in the Fantastic Four sequels or Cellular (yeah, right). Here he has as much fun as he can. Again, in the end writing and directing is what a movie has to fall back on and The Losers doesn’t exactly excel with the cheesy dialogue it’s given. Though Evans is carefree and goes with the flow; relaxed. Maybe I was wrong about him as our First Avenger. The sincerely fantastic superhero flicks of yesteryear have been replaced with tongue-in-cheek grins by laid back megastars such as Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in Iron Man.

Morgan leads the Losers bandwagon as Clay, the man who meets the seductive Aisha (Zoe Saldana) one night in thought at a bar, which leads to a very interesting sequence which takes place in a hotel room. She promises his team revenge on the man who framed them (Jason Patric, ungodly over-the-top as the stereotyped “bad guy” whom we’re against for a reason this movie does not care to fully disclose.) I truly believe that Saldana takes a decent crack at making The Losers more than the B-grade A-Team it actually is. With a track record of such greats as Star Trek and Avatar I have a hard time believing she’ll be remembered for this any more than she will last weekend’s Death at a Funeral. Morgan and Saldana face off in a Bolivia motel, the only great scene in this action booyah. White sets it up so perfectly: blazing flames bordering the outskirts, slow rock music playing justly in the background, stylish fight sequences. It’s too bad he decides to half-ass the rest of The Losers with annoyingly unlevered transitional slo-mo scenes and pointless automotive explosions.

Trying to balance seriousness and plastic style The Losers is a cheesy, bloated exploit that, like Cop Out, ignores nearly every aspect of what made their respectable ‘80s inspirations great. It’s ironic that a movie with so many scenes of characters counterbalancing the entirety of their criminal lives could be so hilariously unaware. White is focused more on making sure each character has equal face time on screen than he is in forming an A-Team-type bond between them; what continuously devotes them to the project they’ve gotten involved in. The Losers is a completely safe, bloodless throwaway of a PG-13 action movie that’s been wrapped up in a colorful bow that doesn’t nearly translate as well onto the screen as it does on the page.