The Losers: Full of Win?

Ha! I just realized that I had this saved as a draft, and never finished my review. Which makes the title and opening of my review of the movie make no sense. So, it's been awhile since I read this book, but I still think of it fairly often. It's possibly one of the best A-Team style stories I've read or watched.

The Losers are a black ops military unit that gets betrayed by a CIA agent known only as Max. They start off just doing a mission for him, and then as they're about to make it out, they get shot down by a missile. After that, things start getting really complicated, completely insane, and kind of fun.

I enjoyed the story in the book a lot more than the movie for a couple of reasons. One, Aisha is completely homicidal, and scary, her tone is completely different in the book. Two, there's no silly vibrating egg black hole bombs, just nukes, a lot of them, but still, just nukes. Three is Max, the primary antagonist, what was Max's goal in the movie? Making money, or something, right? In the book, Max is a patriot, fanatically so. His ultimate goal is to protect America, and the American way of life. This is a bit of a spoiler, but the culmination of his goal is when he positions an oil drilling platform over a piece of the seabed that he has intel is going to be seismically uplifted, delcares it a sovereign nation, and holds the entire world hostage with remote detonated nukes that are hidden all across the globe. Now he's free to strike against America's enemies at his will, and not need to worry about the US catching any of the political fallout. It's so amazingly supervillainy that it's hard to imagine that he's in a gritty military comic, and not fighting Superman.

If you can, check out the book, it's totally worth it, the art takes some getting used to, definitely not what you typically think of with comics, but it grows on you, and really works for the mood of the book, and Max is a great Bond Villain.

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