I am not a fan of Deadpool but I was curious about his first major cinematic appearance. I thought it could be fun. The first sequence is great in terms of direction and originality, using camera to convey a unique sense of action. It was fun too, especially when Deadpool makes a childish drawing of him shooting a bad guy and then shows the drawing to a villain and asks him “have you seen this guy?”. What follows is mediocre though.
The plot is linear and could belong to a second rate action movie of the eighties. I could describe it all in ten lines. Basically, a former special forces soldier is diagnosed with cancer and decides to participate in a secret program that gives people super powers. He is cured from cancer but becomes disfigured and tries to find the man who controlled the program to change him. What makes things more interesting is that Deadpool did everything to stay with his girlfriend and, naturally, she gets involved in his quest. However the plot is never really developed. The emphasis is put on humor and “romance”.
I am writing “romance” because two people having sex for months in a room does not qualify as romance in my book. Listening to Deadpool speaking of love was unconvincing, at best. As for the humor, why do all jokes have to be related with the reproductive system and with things such as butts, masturbation, testicles, etc? Excuse me, but filling a script with such nonsense is not humorous. Some jokes were successful, but most of them are mediocre, meaningless or bad. And the fact that Deadpool speaks only with jokes, in addition to him being able to recover from anything, made it impossible for me to care about his effort.
The action is disappointing for a super hero movie of 2016. Occasionally Deadpool performs some impressive acrobatics but he doesn’t fight any serious opponents. The main villain is boring, just a stupid guy who doesn’t feel pain (so, if he got shot in the back he would bleed to death without noticing?) and hates being called Francis. He also has a helper, a woman who never talks and is incredibly strong. Most impressive. Colossus appears too but he is mostly a comic relief and his battle performance is pathetic.
The choice of locations is another issue. The movie suffers from a lack of imagination and its budget seems to be low. The places where the action takes place are very mundane and visually unappealing: an underground bar, the front door of the X-men mansion, the cheapest secret laboratory ever and a junkyard that is supposedly a fallen helicarrier. Only the fight on the bridge looked good but after that I didn’t see anything interesting.
Deadpool is one of the poorest super hero movies I have watched during the last years. I wasn’t bored because everything happens fast and sometimes there is a good moment, for example Deadpool shooting a bad guy or saying a smart joke. Still, it is not a movie I would see again and it failed to meet my expectations, which were not high to begin with.
Movie Information
Tim Miller
Starring:
Ed Skrein
Morena Baccarin
Ryan Reynolds
T.J. Miller
Publisher(s):
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Genre(s):
Action
Adventure
Sci-fi
Fantasy
Thriller
Comedy
Article by Dimitris
