people in glass houses etc

Rating: 4/10 (19 August 2018)

It just saddens me that this film is so highly rated. There were parts of it I enjoyed but not that many. The tie-in with the X-men world worked for a while because of deadpool's looser sense of ethics, and the reduced circumstances of his - and the kid's incarceration in mutant prison almost makes him vulnerable enough to care about, but none of that lasts, and for the majority - and after those events - remainder of the film, we find ourselves in the presence of someone who not only won't die, but - and of course it is his trade-mark - won't shut up. All superheroes are effectively immortal, but there is something about deadpool's unkillability that really destroys any tension in this movie, and unfortunately it is all done quite deliberately. In most superhero movies we know that that the (super)hero must survive but somehow also worry about them. With deadpool though everything is an in-joke, and that includes the fact that superheroes - deadpool at least - are indestructable, and the movie plays with that endlessly. There is at least one funny scene that arises out of this (consequent to his meeting the monster in the prison basement) but for the most part it simply means we don't care about what happens in the way that we normally would and since the writers appear to anticipate this we are treated instead to endless knowing jokes about his desire to die. The intention seems to be to try to make deadpool into some kind of existentially tragic figure - but unlike say groundhog day, where unkillability becomes a metaphor for sameness of every day, the writers completely fail in this respect. Deadpool's loss (of a loved one) and motivation never seem real, and when he somehow finds a mission in the redemption of one of the characters in the movie it just doesn't seem like something he'd actually do.

There's also the politics of the film. Leaving aside the PC aspect (which is pretty much universal these days) there's also something disturbing about the hate figures in the film. The people who run the 'ophanage' in the fim are thinly disguised religious bigots, and not only the main 'preacher' like head of the institution but all of its staff - who are likened to paedo philes - are simply despatched as token 'haters'. Given the controversies surrounding some of the people who made the x-men films themselves there is something slightly ironic about this - people who live in glass cages shouldn't ....etc.. That's not to say the mutant hating bigots aren't to be faulted, but that we shoiuld perhaps be a little wary about taking our morality from anything as ethically warped as deadpool, a man who though he can't be killed or effectively injured despatches legions of bad guys more in offence than defence, and typically in nasty and fundamentally unfair ways. In fact at times, particularly at the beginning, deadpool as a superhero feels like the cinematic version of shooting, stabbing, hacking and decapitating fish in a barrel.

I just find everything about this film immature and fake. However it probably does know its audience, who from the ratings would appear to like being force fed dubious easter eggs, not to mention hollywood politics and morality. In truth I'm probably just too old for this kind of film, but at the same time I kind of feel so should anyone older than a teenager