At last there’s a movie for anyone who really wants a cheap
R-rated X-Men entry. Deadpool, a comparatively low-budget and
almost entirely disconnected spin-off of Fox’s superhero mutant team-up
franchise, follows a sampler of the exploits of a smart aleck mercenary (Ryan
Reynolds) who is cured of cancer and given regenerative powers like Wolverine’s.
Ah, but the mad scientists who do it (led by the new Transporter
Ed Skrein and Haywire’s Gina
Carano) have vague and nefarious ulterior motives. This leaves the
guy left for dead a scarred and burned mutant with a bad attitude. He’s out for revenge, putting
on a tight red suit and mask and calling himself Deadpool, determined to kill
everyone who wronged him. That doesn’t sound very heroic, and indeed he resists
the label the entire way through a movie of nonstop profanity and violence
interrupted only by its protagonist’s wall-to-wall interior monologue. He turns
to the camera and speaks directly to the audience in a motormouthed outpouring
of cynical snark, as if winkingly calling out its own shortcomings and relentlessly
lampshading the usual superhero formula will inoculate it against criticism.
It’s faithful to the original comics creation, presenting an
arrogant self-aware fourth-wall breaker engaging in huge amounts of
potty-mouthed violence. He talks to us, dictates some edits, calls for needle
drops, and even moves the camera at one point. Mostly he just comments on the
events in progress with juvenile wisecracking, or spits out cultural references
and self-deprecating comments. He tells us the budget was cheap, Reynolds is a
bad actor, and nods towards the franchise’s knottiness. (He throws out an
action figure from X-Men Origins:
Wolverine, and upon hearing a reference to Professor X he asks, “McAvoy or
Stewart?”) The movie goes out of its way to smarmily flatter the audience for
catching the references.
But for all the screenplay (by Zombieland’s Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) literally protests that
this isn’t the usual superhero movie – taking potshots at the competition while
admiring its own casual vigilante gore, filthy language, and mind-in-the-gutter
exploitation – this is a movie undeniably built on the bones of a thoroughly
exhausted and totally predictable origin story structure. It opens with a nasty
fit of bloody action – crunching cars, flying decapitations, and viscera
splattering on road signs – before flashing back to happier times that slowly
catch us up. It fills in details of his pre-power days, introduces his comic
relief buddy (T.J. Miller) and his lost love (Homeland’s Morena Baccarin), and the wrongs done to him. Then it’s
back to the action, as X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage
Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), stepping in as if from a better, brighter movie, reluctantly
join superpowered fights hammering toward a conclusion.
The edgier elements may be turned up to 11, but the more it
loudly and repetitively claims to be something new and innovative, the less it
seems true. The movie is terminally impressed with itself, convinced putting
blood, boobs, and bad words in a standard superhero revenge actioner inherently makes it
better. The script, and the chatterbox commentary from Deadpool, has the wit of
a particularly unimaginative adolescent boy, preoccupied with bodily functions,
focused on sexual and violent fantasies, and punctuated with four-letter words
and bullying insults. Puerile and putrid, it finds sex acts, gory kills, and
vulgarity equally giggle-worthy.
As a result, Deadpool is
irritating, repetitive, and deadening. It’s a smug, smutty, and self-satisfied
movie as ugly as it is off-putting. It drains all natural charisma from its
performers, sending them through bland effects sequences dirtied up with extra
splashes of strained irreverence and material trying so hard to offend it’s
just sad. Give director Tim Miller (an effects’ artist making his feature
debut) some (very small) credit for wanting to stretch the superhero movie a
bit, but maybe we should stop complaining about the genre’s homogeneity if this
is what passes for trying something different. The characters are thinly sketched. The look is flat, flavorless, and
grey. The tone is a swamp of pointless nihilism laughing at itself. The plot is
too thin for narrative propulsion, and too hobbled by its smirking protagonist
for emotional investment. Everything’s a bad joke, and nothing is worth taking
seriously, although the movie has enough bravado and posturing that it’s clear
it convinced itself it’s a hip puncturing of the genre instead of a
mean-spirited affirmation of its nastiest impulses.
And then there’s its repellent, often disgusting, love of
violence. The movie revels in it, not the choreography or the spectacle but the
visual fact of innards spurting from wounds, projectiles ripping flesh, and blades
impaling organs. There’s an extended slapstick gag about Deadpool breaking his
hands and legs and wobbling around in pain before he heals himself. It’s loud,
overextended, pointless, and uncomfortable, but par for the course in a movie that treats
a gunshot to the head as a punchline – not once, not twice, but every time. It’s
no funnier than the tired improv insults and cheap shots that pass for humor in
the rest of the movie. This all adds up to an interminable experience, none of
the best parts of superhero movies and all of the worst, plus a whole bunch of
added irritants.
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