Everything Wrong with Hollywood in One, Smug, Vulgar, Annoying Package

Rating: 1/10 (17 February 2018)

Hollywood has a ton of problems these days. An irrational reliance on big, loud, CGI filled blockbusters, a fixation with TV style digital cinematography, and a compulsion to make movies that are meme-friendly, self-congratulatory, and above all, trendy. This describes the downright depressing point Hollywood has fallen to in the past decade or so. It also describes, to a tee, Deadpool. This subversive superhero movie is a personification of everything today's sardonic millennial moviegoers cherish. It's vulgar, violent, ugly, devious, ironic, and hip. It's one, big meme. Comic book nerds and teenage boys love it. Fine. I hated every second.
The problem right away is that Deadpool is a terrible character. He's a joke, but one that is only funny to those who drool over spandex-clad musclemen and collect kids' toys in their free time. I'm talking about nerds. Deadpool is what nerds think "cool" is. Played with infuriatingly self-satisfied panache by nerd God Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool is an impeccably sculpted, overtly confident, wise-cracking nerd himself. He can win any self-respecting geek over with a quick reference and hardy, fourth wall breaking high five for those who get it. For those in the know, Deadpool is a naughty wish fulfillment character. The asshole they always wished they could be. To the rest of us, he's just an asshole.
Deadpool is among the most unpleasant movies I have ever sat through. I could go a step further and say it is the most unpleasant two hours it could possibly be. Deadpool serves as a shining example of every single thing I hate about movies today. For starters, it's another superhero movie. For all director Tim Miller's insistence that this is a different kind of superhero story, it's really just a typical origin story, peppered with enough F-bombs and sex jokes to make something superficially unique. Secondly, the movie looks dreadful. Digital and grey, just like literally every other movie that has been released since 2010. Is it the current TV-Mania sweeping through the younger generation that is convincing filmmakers to replicate the cheap, washed out look of low budget television? Why else are movies getting worse and worse to look at? Third, and most egregiously, Deadpool is relentlessly full of itself. The script really isn't a script so much as it is a list of jokes, gags, and winks meant only to placate the fans who practically bullied the movie into existence. Deadpool knows its audience will go gaga for its star and his dumb schtick. In fact, they are so confident of their dominion over geekdom that the whole thing reeks of the kind of self-satisfied arrogance of a hack comedian making a dumb crowd go wild.
Deadpool is a movie that will make you lose faith in movies. Hell, it made me lose faith in humanity. If this is the kind of thing people will praise as the new gospel, then we as a race are in serious trouble. Deadpool is a bland superhero movie, a vulgar comedy, and a cynical corporate exercise rolled into a rotten chimichanga of the worst impulses of modern Hollywood. It's not technically the worst movie I've ever seen, but it is, in its relentless nastiness, one of the most thoroughly depressing. I got no enjoyment from Deadpool, and it made me question whether I will ever like a movie again.
07/100