Lots of dick and jokes and blood, but that's not a good thing

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2016)

Let me be perfectly frank. There's a very small market for the new Deadpool movie, and that seems to exclusively be teenage boys who enjoy the odd breast, decapitation, and curse word. While superhero films are all the rage today, Deadpool has always been a very niche superhero, and it seems to me like it won't exactly bring in the female crowd (although I could be entirely wrong about that), and it's rated R (mostly due to its gratuitous violence and nudity), so let's just nix the children right now. This leaves a very small window for the movie, but it's success depends on them, and I feel as if it WILL succeed, although it doesn't entirely deserve to.
"Deadpool" follows mercenary Wade Wilson (a typical Ryan Reynolds) as he is lured into some dark, dingy underground lab in order to receive experimental medical attention in order to cure him of his debilitating cancer. Of course, as if often the case with these superhero films, things to awry, and Wilson is left horribly disfigured, much to his chagrin. This leads him to adopting the Deadpool moniker and beginning his violent adventure to find and kill the man responsible (Ed Skrein). If this sounds overly- familiar, that's because it is. While the movie may want to subvert typical superhero expectations and tropes, it ends up being entirely unoriginal, which is definitely a downside to this otherwise well- intentioned film.
It seems to me like the only thing this movie has going for it is its violence and adult-oriented content, but even that is highly unoriginal. I'm thinking specifically of what last year's "Kingsmen" did to the spy movie, or even what "Kick-Ass" did to this very genre. It presents an atypical hero in an atypical movie, full of blood, carnage, swearing, and nudity that you wouldn't otherwise find in a Hollywood blockbuster superhero film. "Deadpool" wants to market itself as a highly original film that's regarded as an intelligent subversion of superhero tropes, but it often falls into the very own tropes that it's parodying that it loses most of its originality and muster. While teenagers will undoubtedly gobble this movie up because it's filled with boobies and gore and swearing (and that's cool for teenagers, specifically boys), everyone else will find it a merely average, watchable movie that fails at its own ambitions.
Ryan Reynolds is good in the role, as his typical sarcastic humor fits the character of Deadpool perfectly. It's also genuinely stylish, and some of the jokes are admittedly very clever and funny. I'm thinking specifically of the opening credits, where the usual "directed by," "written by" titles are replaced by funny declarations like "from this douchebag," or other, similar titles. It's an original concept, but unfortunately, the film loses its own way immediately after these credits and devolves into a typical superhero film, just with the odd severed head.
For fans of dick jokes, this movie is sure to bring tears to the eyes. But dick jokes can only get you so far, and you can only tell enough of them before it starts to get tiring. Seriously, there's enough jokes about the male genitalia here that it could fill a book and become the Bible of dick jokes. But for anyone who isn't 17 years old, this can get very annoying and unfunny, as it often does. The movie aims for these types of jokes because it isn't what you'd find in a superhero movie, but the film overshoots its own goal and tires its audience out well before the movie thinks it's told enough of them. The same thing goes for the violence. We've seen enough bloody violence in cinema before that these instances are nothing new, yet the movie is so smug and so naive as to think that we'd be amazed at how subversive it is being. It's not. We've seen this all before, we've seen it better, and we've seen it funnier.
In the end, "Deadpool" becomes what it is parodying. The movie wants to make fun of superhero origin tropes, but it becomes one in the process. Wade gets bad news, he becomes the guinea pig of some form of experimentation, he gets magic powers, and he fights his way to the big bad in order to stop him. The only difference here is that his path is littered with tits and severed heads rather than handcuffs. If that's enough for you, you'll be thoroughly entertained. For everyone else, maybe you'd best to rewatch "Kick- Ass" and ponder at what could have been.
C-