Infinite Jest

Rating: Null/10 (10 December 2016)

"Shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which visual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive?" - David Foster Wallace
Sappier than a maple tree at a bukkake party, Tim Miller's "Deadpool" charts the life of Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), a young man who is diagnosed with liver, lung and brain cancer. Seeking a cure, Wade is left permanently disfigured. Not wishing to be rejected by the woman he loves (Morena Baccarin), Wade confines himself to isolation, dons a mask, becomes a superhero called Deadpool and uses his spare time to beat up villains.
If teenage stoners directed a rip-off of Sam Raimi's "Darkman", it would probably look like Miller's "Deadpool". Most of the film's running time is dedicated to sexy white dudes fighting, sniffing crotches, swearing, doing "funny" stuff, trading "clever" wisecracks and hurling incessant non-sequiturs. Sometimes they also take prosthetic penises up the butt. Like most postmodern art, the film's tone is relentlessly ironic, snarky and by extension nihilistic. Nothing matters other than the moment, and the moment exists only to short circuit and titillate the most basic expectations of long atrophied nerve-endings. Man punches other man in crotch. Man breaks hand. Audience laughs. Repeat.
When our heroes aren't hurling one-liners, they're doing slow-motion flips, rocking out to "cool music", shooting people in the head, punching blurry CGI rag-dolls and rescuing women tied-up by evil villains. None of these sequences are done with style, or have any sense of tension, importance, pacing or weight. All rely on the cutaway - to "random" dialogue or "random" physical acts - to generate affect. This is all presented as being "edgy" and "alternative", a lie which not only ignores every other superhero movie (from R rated fare like "Kickass", "Defendor" and "Super", to the wisecracking heroes of "Spiderman" and "Iron Man"), but the entire landscape of postmodernity itself.
Most action movies become cheesy, camp and homo-erotic with time. This is largely because conventional "masculinity" constantly defines itself in opposition to a "femininity" it deems to be weak, an act of opposition which is itself an admittance of weakness and insecurity. And so the conventional action hero is de facto "effeminate". And the more it tries to assert its toughness, the more ridiculous it looks; think the muscle men of 1980s action movies, or how homoerotic most martial arts movies look today.
In "Deadpool" these insecurities take on schizophrenic dimensions. Wade Wilson is sexy and invincible but also impotent and ugly. He's ridiculously hyper-masculinised (even sociopathic), but is constantly cracking homoerotic jokes, having anal sex and salivating over Rent, Wham and the prospect of fondling balls. This has led to some fans claiming that the character represents "pansexuality", when in reality, like everything Deadpool does, or postmodernity as a whole does, such "jokes" only exist to anticipate and short-circuit sincerity. Deadpool's bro humour mocks "masculinity" to stop you from mocking it first. In this way it inscribes a new type of 21st century "masculinity"; open to all contradictions, so long as it still gets to be the hero.
"Deadpool" is based on a Marvel Comics character. Like most Marvel films, it is strictly irreverence by committee; like watching a Nike sponsored live-stream of six ADD-inflicted kids dissing each other's mothers under a YouTube video walk-through of the sixth level of "Call of Duty 14". It is currently the highest grossing R rated film of all time. Its sequel is in the works. Perhaps also a prequel. And also a spin-off. It contains a character called Negasonic Teenage Warhead.
5/10 - Worth one viewing.