In the end, "Goliath" all comes down to a big 'ol shootout and chase sequence on the runway of an airport in Houston, and it's pretty much exactly the way I was hoping the story would end. It is pretty clear at this point that the Losers is the comic book equivalent of a big budget Jerry Bruckheimer action movie, and though there are problems with the Bruckheimer formula, Diggle and Jock so far seem to have dodged the obstacles while maintaining the cool adrenaline rush thrill ride positive aspects. This issue has a couple big one-on-one confrontation and some inventive moments of violence, culminating in a spectacular finale for the Losers first arc.
I've been going back and forth on my favorite member of the team throughout this arc, trying to decide whether it's the motor-mouthed infiltrator Jensen or the cool and laconic Cougar. In this particular issue, it's Cougar who gets to shine, stepping away from his usual sniper role to get a little more up-close and personal in his gunfighting. Jock gives Cougar an abstract but cool-looking shotgun, and does a fantastic job of showing how fast and fluid his movements with it are. There's a fantastic moment on the runway when Cougar is standing out there all alone, with a shotgun to bring down some really big prey, and the way he does it just looks relentlessly cool.
While it's Cougar who gets the coolest moments in the issue, at least for my money, that doesn't mean the rest of the team is forgotten. Aisha faces down the traitor, a clever pairing given that many assumed she was the traitor within the group, and the result is a bloody and brutal hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, Clay faces down his opposite number on the bad guys' team, culminating in a messy action-movie villain sort of finale that got an out-loud exclamation of surprise from this reader. And Pooch, the driver, gets some fun moments as well, in a scene that is teased on Jock's excellent cover.
Diggle and Jock basically just do a great job of drawing the reader into this action movie world that the Losers live in. The change-up early in the roster, revealing one of the characters as a traitor, was a very good choice, as it established that big things can happen. Although I don't see it happening any time soon, I think that there's a willingness to kill main characters, and that adds tension and danger to the stories. Though half the fun of Losers is just the adrenaline ride nature of it, there's also a story building here, one where we want to see the dangerous but more moral Losers win out against Max and the corrupt elements of the CIA that he represents.
For a while, there have been rumors of an A-Team big budget movie in the works. The Losers is sort of the idealized version of what that sort of thing might look like, taking the rag-tag outcast team archetype that was the big appeal of the A-Team and losing the cheesier aspects like the bloodless gunfights. If you were going for the simplest possible description, in other words, you could say that Losers is the A-Team done right.
