Deadpool (2016)

So I finally got around to watching Deadpool last night, and despite being tired of the hype that the Fox marketing team has been shoveling for months now, I found myself thinking that this is probably the best "superhero" movie that they've put out.

If you haven't heard yet (and I don't see how that's possible as their marketing was EVERYWHERE for a few months), Deadpool is a Valentine's date movie about a man who finds out he has cancer and rashly decides that he can't put the love of his life through the pain of watching him die. Over the course of an hour and forty-eight minutes, he realizes that that was the stupidest decision of his life.

It's rather moving.



There also happen to be about forty-seven decapitations, twenty or so instances of dismemberment, a hundred twenty-two stabbings, and numerous references to drug use, alternate sexual proclivities, dicks, boobs, butts, your mother, homosexuals, heterosexuals, murder, torture, oral sex, and a sand paper dildo. There are also a number of off-color jokes, pop culture references, fourth wall breaks, mentions of Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld, and an innumerable quantity of f-bombs and curious variations there of.

Thankfully, there didn't seem to be any cuts to the film where we watched it (SM Aura). Unless there was something more graphic than Ryan Reynolds mashing Morena Baccarin's breasts during rough sex or Deadpool murdering a dozen men in cold blood with 12 bullets, two swords, and a car lighter. I love the fact that they went for the hard R rating for this film. Like Dredd before it, there is just no way that this movie could have had the spirit of the books as a PG-13 hand job. For a character like Deadpool, it's got to be full on violence porn, or go home. In fact, I think that's why the Wolverine movies have been so blah for me. He's supposed to be the best at what he does, but that PG-13 means Logan can't do what it is he does on-screen. Wade Wilson can though, and he does.

He also gets the snot kicked out of him multiple times and eventually has to enlist the help of X-Men, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (you saw the trailers, shut up about "spoilers"). I loved Negasonic. Brianna Hildebrand is gorgeous and the changes they made to Grant Morrison's character and power were great (I'm not a fan of his run, so anything's an improvement). Colossus however was the low point for me. It's not just the fact that he's a CGI motion capture construct, it's that he's always been my favorite X-Man and I never see him in the awesome hero mode where he does his gotta-protect-my-teammates-cause-they're-my-family thing. We don't even get his rage monster unstoppable side. Here he's kind of a douche bag zealot, spouting prose about power and responsibility.

If I wanted to hear that, I'd be watching The Amazing Spider-Man. And it wouldn't come with a pretend Russian accent.

But yeah, that's my only complaint. The rest of this film is excellent. The respect it has for the material, the writing, the acting, the costumes (Negasonic is in an actual X-Men uniform! Fucken-A!), the action, the humor (there's an actual Ferris Bueller's Day Off reference, holy shit), the violence, Morena Baccarin, and everything else.

It's just good clean fun.