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I'm typing this in sloooooow mooooootion and it's soooooo cooooool As a student, I used to make short films with my friends. These were never terribly serious endeavors - for example, one was a pseudo-Western in which I played a hermit who sought vengeance against someone who stole his stuffed toy monkey - but I would try to make them with a certain degree of competence. The main problem I had was that I always struggled to come up with enough material to make the films up to a decent length. I'd come up with a certain amount, but then feel like there wasn't enough, so I would throw any old dumb idea in to make it long enough so that it felt like a "real" short film. Bear in mind that my definition of the length of a "real" short film was about 10 minutes, so this wasn't exactly Barton Fink failing to write a wrestling picture; I was just really lazy. Whilst watching The Losers, I suddenly discovered that I needn't have stressed over those films so much, because all I needed to do to get them up to an appropriate length was just to use copious amounts of slow motion. The Losers clocks in at a slim 97 minutes, of which roughly five minutes is the end credits, and seemingly ten minutes is slow motion. White takes any opportunity he can to stretch the film out and make even the most mundane action seem achingly cool and important. And he doesn't even restrict it to the action sequences; there's one moment in which two chickens are thrown into a ring from either side of the screen which is lovingly depicted as if they were staring in an all cockerel remake of The Wild Bunch. Crucially, he spends a lot of the time depicting the lovely Zoe Saldana doing things at half speed, and I'm perfectly fine with that, because without the slow motion her screen time would be negligible, as she would flit from scene to scene like some kind of sexy Roadrunner.
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