An Immature, Unremarkable Romp

Rating: 5/10 (15 May 2016)

Reviewing anything comedy related tends to lead to disgruntled readers and accusative comments. Comedy, as a rule, is not supposed to be exceptional or even good by most accounts. In Roman times, humor stemmed from jokes about genitals and bowel movements just as we laugh at the same today. There's really no such thing as high-brow humor and so I find it disturbing when people mistake my dislike of humorous movies or cartoons or such as the complaints of someone high and mighty about himself. I love a good dick joke as much as the next guy, but humor for me comes from execution, pay-off, and unexpectedness.
Deadpool from a humor perspective has very little of that. I chuckled occasionally at Marvel's latest superhero flick, but I never found myself laughing out loud. The opening credits roll making jokes of the producers and director set the tone of the films humor stylings: blatant, crass, and occasionally funny.
Deadpool is the tale of a man named Wade who contracts a serious form of cancer. In order to combat it, he accepts a proposal to become a superhero and winds up instead in a miserable situation, tortured by a mutant named Ajax (Francis). It's a revenge/love plot that was a surprisingly perfect fit for the Valentine release.
Deadpool tells its story in a segmented and awkward way, throwing us into the action immediately, cutting back to the past, then cutting forward again, then back again. It kind of works at first but the third flashback is long, boring, and ultimately kills the middle of the film. This was the point I was struggling to stay awake.
I don't mind plot in a movie contrary to what I'm saying, but the origin story of Deadpool is nothing spectacular and in a film that relishes violence with an almost sexual passion, I felt that the pacing was poor and killed the entire experience. After you get past the flashbacks and get to the current action, you'll probably be too bored to care any further what happens.
And for me, even trying to stay attentive of the movie through the final act, I was still bored. The villains were boring, Deadpool's hero companions were dull, and the final fight was not epic or well-directed or choreographednothing stood out to me. And despite a gory, violent opening, the ending seemed relatively tame.
And that's where Deadpool fails for me. It's an R-rated movie that feels like it doesn't particularly have to be. The cursing, the gore, and the sex are all self-indulgent, the entire movie a middle finger to traditional superhero movies. And I respect that and went into the film expecting an enticingly adult-slanted Marvel movie. But what I got felt more like something a middle schooler would write. The cursing was middle-school level, ,many of the jokes were juvenile (there were some decent mature jokes in there too)it just didn't feel organic, much of it felt forced. And as I looked around the theater at the kids watching, their parents irresponsible enough to allow eight and nine year old's entrance, I realized that maybe this WAS meant to be "Babies First R-Rated Film".
This movie is doing exceptionally well at the box office and I'm guessing this mature action/comedy is being talked about in many a schoolyard. Deadpool is a technically poor movie with bad pacing, a lackluster set of characters, and humor that just wasn't my style relying too much on obscene one-liners than jokes with actual buildup and payoff. But, I guess, it's an okay film and probably one Marvel fans and Deadpool fans especially will enjoy. But aside from a good opening action sequence and a couple chuckle-worthy jokes here and there, Deadpool was a dud for me.