- For better and mostly worse, the movie Deadpool is a faithful interpretation of the comic book character Deadpool. In other words, the film is crude, puerile, and obnoxious. In case you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the character, even his fans would describe him as a one-time Deathstroke knockoff who's chattier than Spider-Man, less of a hero than the Punisher, and more adept at making dick jokes than...everybody. When I've encountered Deadpool in comics, he's been funny for at most five minutes. That's not a bad average for an issue that takes ten minutes to read, but it's downright excruciating for this film's 108-minute runtime.
- Two of the film's five funny minutes arrive immediately with its opening credits, which snarkily refer to the acting talents of "God's Perfect Idiot" (Ryan Reynolds), "A Hot Chick" (Morena Baccarin), "A British Villain" (Ed Skrein), "The Comic Relief" (T.J. Miller), and "A Moody Teen" (Brianna Hildebrand). From that refreshingly honest start, the film bounces back and forth between the present, in which Deadpool hunts down the people responsible for transforming him into the scarred superhuman that he is today, and the past, wherein his origins are delivered in far greater detail than I would have expected. Although neither timeline works especially well, his origin story is a particularly toxic mix of R-rated meet-cute, unexpected illness, and torture porn. Imagine Love Story directed by Quentin Tarantino.
- Rather than detail all of Deadpool's bad choices (the worst of which may be "Blind Al", a character played by Leslie Uggams who exists solely for jokes about blindness and old age), let me focus on the film's one literally shining star: Colossus. Accurately credited as "A CGI Character" and voiced by Stefan Kapičić, this gentle giant X-Man is paradoxically the most relatably human character in the entire film. His fundamental decency, played mostly for cynical jokes, brings into sharp contrast just how vacuous the rest of the film really is. Although the writers refer to themselves in the credits as "The Real Heroes Here," they and "Overpaid Tool" director Tim Miller made a movie that somehow plays like a combination of bathroom graffiti, video game message boards, distasteful subreddits, and presidential outtake videos. The takeaway message? Contrary to what you may have heard, great power can also come with great (sound of toilet flushing).
- Also starring Gina Carano as Angel Dust, Karan Soni as an Indian stereotype, Stan Lee as a strip club DJ, and Rob Liefeld as a bounty hunter.
