What, in the name of Canada, is this garbage?

Rating: 4/10 (6 May 2019)

How does one know when a civilisation is doomed? When a film like "Deadpool" makes 363 million dollars at the American box-office and 783 worldwide, that's when. The film is a wretched experience - the result of what might happen if a sixth former were to be given a couple of miles of film stock; all the money in the world and then told to go shoot something. It is a violent, unpleasant circus; a mess of postmodernism, a disturbing freakshow of special effects and the grotesque - I am staggered that there exist people in the world who do not think that the film is a badly judged, poorly made piece of repugnant exhibitionism which saps the soul and dulls the mind. Decades ago, a film like "The Mask" demonstrated that you don't have to be rude to be funny; now, "Deadpool" informs us that you can be almost totally irredeemable but cool.
Indeed, not since "The Mask" have I seen a lead physically interact with the fabrics of a cinematic universe as intently as Deadpool does here. At various points in the film, in no particular order, the lead will do all of the following: fast-forward the movie; insult other off-screen superheroes; break the fourth-wall within a fourth-wall breaking flashback; stick chewing gum to the camera and then later actually pan the camera away using his hand so that we may not gaze upon an especially violent moment.
We all smirked when we first saw "Pulp Fiction" and heard a character literally re-tune the radio over the opening credits, but very little of any of this is as clever as it thinks. Nor is it especially ground-breaking - films as diverse as "Man Bites Dog" and "Breathless" had been experimenting with these sorts of tropes years earlier, while the putting of it to a series of sword-violence just reminded me of "Kill-Bill". "Man Bites Dog" (to which "Deadpool" probably owes the greatest debt), for instance, even includes a scene whereby the Deadpool-style psychopath the camera crew follow around quite literally edits a scene of the movie himself, so insinuating that it is he who is putting the whole project together.
"Deadpool" is about an ex-special forces soldier-turned-street punk named Wade Wilson, who is portrayed by Ryan Reynolds. Wilson mooches around collecting debts and sorting out problems amongst the scum of the city - in his own words, he is a bad guy whose job it is to mess with even worse guys. His best friend Weasel (T.J. Miller), who owns a local tavern, and his girlfriend is sex-worker Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). This was all before he suddenly contracted cancer and had to undergo treatment; something he did so through an organisation headed up by a shady, suited individual who looks conspicuously like Max Keiser. But the organisation was not quite what was advertised, and following complications which disfigure him, he becomes the character of Deadpool: a red tracksuit sporting super-freak extremely well-versed in katana blades and with little else on his mind but revenge.
And that is, broadly speaking, the end of it - the set-up is an excuse for a series of scenes depicting little more than bloody carnage, each as spectacularly dull as the last: what is the point in verbally mocking superhero films and the action genre if you're just going to fall into being a mindless one yourself? As a lead, Deadpool is an incredibly simplistic character - doing under his new identity more or less what he did under his old one, only on a bigger and bloodier scale. Nothing really characterises him - he shares no duality with a villain as there is no real villain, merely a fellow punk who worked at the medical facility with whom he had a few cross-words. The character, made invulnerable during the treatment, results in there being no suspense to any of the set-pieces. What are we thus even watching? Is there a statement being made, about violence in popular culture, or otherwise? Was there a remark in there on America's healthcare system that I missed?
Sad though it is to say, films such as "Deadpool" are where mainstream American cinema finds itself: big, brash and bombastic but with nothing actually to it. The film left me feeling empty; I was sad when it ended, but sad for civilisation and cinema - sad that there were people out there who genuinely thought the contents of this piece were what people wanted to see and might make for a substantial film-going experience. Is there a better example of a film which might act as the epitome of our society's slow, inevitable culture-death than Tim Miller's 2016 effort here? Today's age, characterised by fatuity and crudity, is perfectly positioned to produce the miserable experience that-is "Deadpool". That it garners such awesome praise, and makes such vast amounts of money, is surely the signal that what we were warned about all those years ago has finally come to pass.