No faith in humanity

Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a video game playing, 30 year old nerd that thinks Rick and Morty is pretty good and I've laughed at South Park.

I wasn't familiar with the Deadpool character until I heard my friends talking about him and how awesome he is. He sure looked cool.. But I'm not that into comic books and superheroes, although I'm a Batman fan, and I tend to enjoy other super hero cartoons and films, well enough. Not crazy about this stuff, but I get around to watching them.

So my roommate brings home Deadpool on DVD from the library. I heard that it was well done and a fun time.. Plus he was a pop culture phenomenon it seems.. So the movie begins and there's a lot of CGI, wire stunts, and slo-mo.. Not a grey start, but let's see where it goes.. Well, 5 more min. in and I'm not sure I'll easily be able to sit through it. It quickly becomes apparent that this may have been something I would have thought to be hilarious as a younger man, 12 -15, but the humor, the unrelenting swearing as an attempt at comedy just comes off so unfunny and forced.

Look, I actually still think farts are funny, but this movie is not. There's no subtly here. It's like when you're hanging around a guy who isn't funny, but he thinks everyone sees him as hilarious, so he just keeps going on and on with awful crass jokes.
Using the word *beep* isn't inherently funny.. There were a couple laughs over hundreds of cringe inducing lines, but mostly it was annoying if anything. VIOLENCE! PENIS! SWEARING!

Probably the funniest line in the movie probably had to do with the deadpan delivery of it, but it was when the friend in the bar said "You look like an avocado *beep* another older avocado". I laughed at that.. A problem though, is that they throw this kind of line out a lot. Like very other line is something about how something is like one thing *beep* another thing, and then some other nasty thing.

They also use this sort of thing a lot.. Where they combine swearing in a way that it doesn't really make sense, but since it's swearing and unusual, it's supposed to be funny.. like "bag of *beep* It's just all so forced.


Aside from a bunch of teenage boy humor, there's a flimsy origin story and a final confrontation. For some reason, there are two not very interesting X-men characters that join in for the final battle, but their presence made me with I was watching be of the last couple Xmen movies I haven't caught up with yet.

Deadpool is a bad movie. It's competently produced, decent fight scenes when they aren't too focused on slomo, and acceptable enough too keep you wondering 'is he going to get the bad guy?', but I have a pretty high tolerance for lousy movies. If I were most people, I'd have probably shut it off or started using my smartphone. It tries so hard to be funny and edgy, that it's painful and uncomfortable.

I'd give it a 4 or 5/10 if they dialed back the 'jokes' and left the decently produced action scenes, origin story, and final battle, but even all of that is saturated in awful attempts at humor.. You can't avoid the point of the film, which is a humorless jackass forcing the f word down your throat every 3 seconds while being badass and killing a bunch of generic goons.

So I give Deadpool a 3/10. Watch it on mute if you can. Actually, watching with subtitles might make it a little more tolerable, but it'll still be a bore. If you like Super Heroes and comedy, 'Kickass' has a similar vibe, or even try Antman, which is a fun enough distraction.

Anyway, I'm left with the notion that I'm alone in the world, finding this movie pretty bad, while all my friends and apparently everyone, loves it. I want to say 'different strokes', but then all those people who liked Deadpool people would laugh, because I said the word stroke.