Movie Review: Deadpool

Stars: 2 out of 5

Pros: Some of the humor, the action

Cons: Much of the humor, hard to root for any of the characters

The Bottom Line:

Anti-hero born

Action and off-color jokes

Result not for me

I Was Warned Away from This Movie.  They Were Right

Over the last few years, I’ve heard lots of praise for Deadpool.  But a few friends have all ended their praise by saying, “But this isn’t a movie you’d enjoy, Mark.”  I believed them, but a small part of me was curious about it, so I decided to watch it with a friend recently.  Those warnings?  They were completely right.

The movie introduces us to Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) in action as he is in the process of getting the information he needs to get revenge on someone who did something horrible to him.  And it’s in the middle of flashbacks that we learn just what happened to him.  He used to be a man named Wade who happened to fall in love with a woman named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin).  Just as their relationship was fully blooming, Wade got horrible news.  In an attempt to fix things, he agrees to some questionable experiments.  What might the consequences be?

Because the movie starts out about two thirds of the way into the story, we jump right in with the action, and then we get the context to this origin story.  Considering how similar origin story movies can be, I did like this approach despite my usual dislike of this story telling framework.

There is plenty of action.  There’s a great opening and closing scene, and a few other fun action scenes along the way.  I bought the action, stunts, and effects, although this wasn’t as heavy on the special effects as some superhero movies can be.

The people I know who praised the movie love it for the humor.  Unfortunately, much of that is double entendre humor.  While I will admit to finding some of that funny, here it was just too crude for my tastes.  And there was a lot of it.  In many ways this movie is as much comedy as action/superhero.

Some of the humor did come from Wade breaking the fourth wall, sometimes with other characters and sometimes just to us.  These jokes I did appreciate.  Well, most of the time.  At times, I felt like it was trying a bit too hard.  It came across as “Look at me, aren’t I clever.”

Deadpool is very much an anti-hero.  I don’t usually go for revenge movies, and that’s essentially what this movie was.  Yes, I was rooting for him, but I wasn’t rooting for him completely because of that.  Not to mention that Wade really was rather shallow early in the movie.

Speaking of early in the movie, there is an extended sex scene early on in the movie.  Keep that in mind before you watch it.  This is an R rated movie.

The results of all of this was a movie I wanted to like, but I didn’t wind up enjoying.  I know plenty of people who did enjoy Deadpool, but it just isn’t for me.