Jason Patric is an actor I’d like to see work a lot more. He’s more choosy than most, and dismissive of a lot of mainstream fare. (Yeah, despite having Speed 2 on the resume.) So Variety’s report that he’s joined the cast of The Losers, directed by Sylvain White, is pretty significant. His presence as the film’s bad guy just upped my interest in the project by a huge margin.

Patric will play Max, “a CIA agent who has gone off the rails and sets up the title characters, a black ops team, to be killed.” He’ll be opposite Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana and Idris Elba. Quite a serious cast for what sounds at first like a pulpy, possibly even silly film. Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt wrote the script based on the Vertigo comic series by Andy Diggle and Jock. As the plot of the series is summed up by Wikipedia,

Eager for revenge and the opportunity to remove their names from a secret CIA death list, the Losers regroup and conduct covert operations against the CIA and its interests, uncovering startling operations spearheaded by the enigmatic Max, whose influence within the CIA and U.S. government is unparalleled.

Patric’s statements about taking the job will probably be viewed as dismissive and elitist by some, but I like the fact that he’s not just jumping at every easily merchandised role that comes his way. “Let’s face it, the geeks have inherited the world, and if you want to be a player in this system, you have to be willing to do some of this,” Patric tells Variety. “But I wouldn’t do ‘The Losers’ if it wasn’t interesting to me as an actor.” The actor has always been great at really digging into his work and I’m excited to see him as a pure villain.