Where exactly does Deadpool stand in the History of Cinema?

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2016)

If you could image your subconscious thoughts during a movie, you'd come up with a leather-bound thesis after watching The Godfather and Pulp Fiction, an exuberant treatise after La Dolce Vita, a double-retrograde flowchart after Memento and a dialectic paperback after The Dark Knight. After Deadpool..you can relay such thoughts using a binary alphabet;
"Ha. Haa. Ha ha. Ah! AHH!! Hah. AAAH." It humors in its own laughability. That's something, if you'll go for anything.
Ryan Reynolds is inviolably cast as Deadpool (not-so-much as Wade), and Ed Skrein as "A British Villain", whose invulnerable machismo would have sipped the tension out of Game of Thrones, is appropriate here, sneezing at impalements-by-sword like they were fly-bites. Morena Baccarin looks good naked and is a good actress. The movie kindly lets her reveal one of those things as Vanessa.
Up on the technical floor, does Deadpool have a unique cinematic vocabulary, in the way of Battleship Potemkin or even Un Chien Andalou...? The opening tableau vivant was more imaginatively rendered in Days of Future Past...and the concept was more provocatively employed in Cashback (2006), objectively; it's a tired, haggard dog of a trick. In its defense, there IS that ass-to-ass match cut, and...that's it. Other than that it speaks in the same bromidic visual clichés our optic ears are numb from hearing, it might as well be (and is) a competently made romantic comedy about a guy whose uprooted penis can grow back, each time with a "boing!!"
Yet it's billed as an "action" movie. Violence is a delicious promise from the trailers. Do its cartoonishly (the script admits as much) over-choreographed dance/fight scenes contain anything 1/10th as visceral as Morsov's Leap from Fury Road, or even Buster Keaton's locomotive hypercrobatics from The General (1926)? It fartin-wishes. More like those burn-worthy Kung Fu D-movies circa 1995, whose poster is the hero walking away from a 'blown-up' matchstick explosion.
Down on the fundamental story level, there's only a string of 30 seconds during its 108-minute unspooling time during which Deadpool acquires the illusion of depth; stalking his girlfriend Vanessa and shamed by his burnt-sausage looks, strangers on the street throw censoriously disgusted stares at Wade Wilson; "get a mask!". This scene earned an echo of thought about the human condition; "Yeah, they all do that." A non-teenage film would use this development as a launchpad into balancing laughs and meditation on societal vanity versus individual dysmorphic syndrome. But hey, the movie tells me....meditation is for the temple, NOT the multiplex. Touche and ha ha. Safer to take the crowd's advice..and please them.
So much for being a "popcorn movie"--and only a passable one at that--Age of Ultron features one timelessly ponderable moment: "What is This?", wonders Ultron in basso elettrico upon awakening and achieving self-awareness. It's a bit of writing that invoked the same feeling of primal, dread-filled fascination in me as The Genesis of the Robot and the subsequent Birth of False Maria in Metropolis (1927). It also made me wonder, on an embryonic cogitative level...if that same thought had occupied my inchoate fetal mind at a point during my gestation. All this during an ultimately disappointing Superboys' Day-out Comedy.
You see a different kind of self-awareness in Deadpool...Wade knows he's a comic book character in a Fox movie with an audience watching it. Only problem is this--apart from pandering to fan-men and fan-women (but ..fanboys, mostly)--does not serve the story at all. The existential disequilibrium between Deadpool and Ultron is; Ultron will always have achieved self-awareness, duplicated it and attempted to destroy all those who preceded him to it, while Deadpool ends up talking to himself if you go for a snack and leave the BluRay playing. Even he can't laugh at how kooky-ridiculous he looks doing that.
Detractors of Deadpool cite how it only shuffles the deck without adding any fresh cards; breaking the fourth wall has been popular since The Tramp winked at us in Charlie Chaplin's films...die-hard fans bark at that, "it's the first time it's been done in a comic book adaptation!" Alrighty then. I suppose the next time a kid splits his knee open, and some Superloon licks the wound..it'll be heralded as novelty too.
As one blasphemer--who hasn't been in the game much between 1994 and now--put it, Deadpool is the freshest script he's encountered since Pulp Fiction...except Tarantino's Film is a deconstruction, a subversion and a re-invention of the Hollywood Gangster Genre. Deadpool on the other pole isn't one cent more than a sardonic riff. The kind of insights Deadpool brings to the superhero-cash-cow genre are the sort you throw-away with pothead bar-acquaintances on a lazy Saturday afternoon (ouchie! superhero landings are hard on your knees!), or lying awake on the operating table..(the camera's the only thing that's pulling out tonight!)..waiting for the second half of your lobotomy. Apparently, say the fans, that's more than good enough for a Comic Book Movie. Ah.
Am I a pedant-on-stilts who can't have fun at the (real silly) movies? Ha ha ha ha. "Nah", I'm just an adult who was thinking when I watched the movie. That's why, it earns a 6/10.