A wise-cracking superhero for teenagers and geeks

Rating: 7/10 (29 February 2016)

I can understand why 16-to-25-year-old geeky guys (i.e. the internet generation) would love this movie. It's a fast-paced video-game ride of a movie with many, many wise cracks, self-deprecating humour and cultural references. It has an overtly camp edge to it. Much of this movie constitutes a running dialogue between Wade and his adolescent viewers. This movie is cool, camp, sexy and violent. (The violence and sex in this movie are not that over the top. I saw nothing that really made me squeamish. It is more graphic than most movies. There was an extended torture scene that made me a little uncomfortable..)
The movie's themes are the themes of adolescence in the early 21st century: sci-fi, superhero movies (yes, the movie's genre was also a theme), fitting in, rebellion, anxiety about personal and professional failure, angst about disease, looks and getting the girl, stalking, cruelty, bullying, alienation, feminism, sexuality, etc.
The movie doesn't even pretend to be realistic. Yes, I know it's a movie about a comic-book figure, but c'mon there has to be something realistic about it.
And it's not adult in any way. You know what I'm talking about. This is not a movie for adults.
I have to go back to see the movie twice because much of it was too fast. The movie was funny, but the kind of funny where you feel afterwards that you didn't quite get the joke. Cultural references hurled at the viewer do not make a movie intelligent.
I did get some visceral enjoyment out of it all. I was mildly moved on a few occasions, and I did chuckle out loud. But at the end -- despite its attempts to be an anti-superhero movie -- much of it was just the same loud, over-the-top bust-everything-up superhero cr*p you see in all these films. The big scenes here are the same old sh*t: big crashes, disasters, shootouts, kung-fu fighting.
I thought at one point that the film was made for young men who have grown up with difficulties focusing and require a barrage of snappy dialogue and crashes to enjoy anything.
It's really just another Marvel X-men movie. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I really liked the last one, so that's two good ones in a row. It's just that I don't need all my movies to be franchise movies about Marvel comic figures or anything else. Let's do other things once in a while. This movie didn't blow me away as much as that Galaxy movie.
I want to give it about 7.5. I have to round it down because I can't say this movie was all that great. It's somebody else's 10, 9 or even 8. It's a 7 to me.