Deadpool and its Discontents
On movies (and movie stars) that try to hard (or don't)
I’ve had a running tradition on here of posting occasional recaps of the Movie Night flicks I watch with The Pip (and occasionally other members of the family), but that’s been a bit of a casualty of my recent attempts to cut down on weekend computer time. At this point, enough of a backlog has built up that I don’t even want to put a post together during the week. There are a handful of things that feel worth saying something about, though, so you get a bit of a grab-bag here.
Over the weekend, both kids expressed an interest in going to see the new Deadpool and Wolverine, so we went to an actual theater on Sunday evening to take that in. As I said on ex-Twitter, it was… kind of a lot.
One of the more devastatingly accurate assessments anyone’s ever made of me was one time when my parents and I were visiting my sister at college, and we went out to dinner with her and one of her friends. I was telling some exaggerated anecdote, probably about my grad-school housemates, and when I finished her friend said “You know, your brother’s pretty funny.”
“Yeah, I know,” my sister replied. “The problem is, he knows that.”
The whole Deadpool franchise is a lot like that: it’s a superhero movie that’s spoofing superhero movies, made by funny people who know that they’re funny and desperately want you to also know that they’re funny. Which leads to just a relentless avalanche of jokes stepping on other jokes, at a volume and velocity that becomes kind of exhausting.
That said, on net I think I prefer their lampshade-on-a-lampshade approach to the normal Marvel approach of treating brain-meltingly inane multiverse twaddle with the ponderously Serious manner of a movie that has actual emotional depth. Nothing about any plot within the multiverse setting makes the slightest bit of sense— how do you run a ticking-bomb scenario when half your cast have time machines?— and the rare successes in the format are wholly dependent on having charismatic actors sell absolute horseshit. Loki works when it’s Tom Hiddleston and either Owen Wilson or Ke Huy Quan playing off each other, and falls almost completely flat when anyone else has the screen. Benedict Cumberbatch can’t pull it off as Dr. Strange, and the combined charm of Tom Holland and a bunch of stunt cameos didn’t quite save the most recent Spider-Man. The Spiderverse movies try to get through on bravura art direction, but that just ended up annoying me more.
The Deadpool franchise is playing the game on easy mode, because they’re not really trying to sell this particular mound of horseshit, and in fact are all too happy to point out repeatedly how badly it stinks. All the same, they have enlisted a couple of astonishingly good salesmen in Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds (who has one of the worst cases of knows-he’s-funny in recorded history, but is genuinely entertaining all the same). Jackman in particular probably saves the movie from going off the rails in the opposite direction from the recent run of Marvel nonsense, because he manages to convey that he knows this is nonsense while also playing it like it’s fucking Shakespeare. His performance here almost rivals Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol.
In this sense, it’s sort of interesting to compare-and-contrast Deadpool and Wolverine with a couple of other movies from our recent pop culture consumption, starting with The Fall Guy. This is another not-at-all-serious movie that is to a large degree relying on a charismatic lead to carry off nonsense; in this case, the other big Hollywood Ryan. It’s an interesting contrast, because while Ryan Gosling’s performance clearly requires a lot of effort— both physically and in selling some pretty silly plot contrivances— he’s never quite as visibly working hard as Reynolds is.
Admittedly, the task he’s facing is easier, because the horseshit he’s asked to sell isn’t as cosmic in scale. And he’s got a great partner in Emily Blunt— their on-screen chemistry is terrific. (Also, shout-outs to Winston Duke as the stunt coordinator of the film-within-the-film and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Evil Matthew McConaughey.) It’s not a subtle film by any means, but Gosling is a weirdly relaxed presence, and that’s a big part of what makes it work.
Also in the “weirdly relaxed” category is Glen Powell in Hit Man, the new film from Richard Linklater, a director who absolutely embodies “not visibly trying hard while delivering impeccable craft.”
This is, again, a pretty silly plot about a mild-mannered academic who serially reinvents himself playing a killer for hire as part of a police task force to trap people who want to kill rivals of one sort or another. It’s a ton of fun, though, because Powell plays the lead with the same seemingly effortless charm as Gosling. The role isn’t as physically demanding as The Fall Guy, but might be a touch showier in that it has a montage sequence of Powell doing a whole bunch of different “hit man” characters matched to the personalities of different would-be clients. (Which is hilarious…)
It’s also striking because, when removed from the context of the movie, the ending is shockingly bleak and misanthropic— Kate boggled when I described the plot to her while we were walking the dog. Powell and Adria Arjona are so charming as a screen couple, though, that the ultimate resolution of the story is satisfying, bordering on heartwarming, when it unfolds on screen. Without anybody involved visibly trying all that hard.
(Having mentioned Powell and Linklater, I’ll also note that I watched another movie from the two of them, 2016’s Everybody Wants Some!! (a movie with not just one, but two exclamation points in the title):
(This was, as you can see from the photo, watched while riding the stationary bike in the basement, which it’s well-suited to as a spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused. It’s a shaggy and episodic story about college baseball players in Texas in 1980, easy to drop in and out of. This has been recommended a bunch of times on movie podcasts from The Ringer, and I definitely endorse that— it was a fun watch. Powell is a standout as Finnegan, a fast-talking bullshit artist who sorta-kinda takes Blake Jenner’s main character, a freshman pitcher named Jake, under his wing.
(I can see where this wouldn’t be to all tastes, as the guys at the center of the film are all douchebags, which would be hard to get past for some folks. They’re fundamentally good-hearted douchebags, though, and nothing actually bad happens, because it’s a hangout movie. There was a bit where I tensed up a little, when the team get in a fight at a disco bar and then decamp for a country bar. The one Black player says basically “Are we really going to do this?” which very briefly had me worried that there was going to be some kind of racial incident, etc., but then I remembered “This is a Linklater movie…” and relaxed again.)
Back toward the other extreme, there was also Furiosa:
This is, as it says on the title card, a Mad Max Saga, and as such is 1000% invested in a very particular aesthetic, with an infinitesimal level of interest in making actual sense. This isn’t really a coherent movie as such— it’s really just a loosely connected series of vignettes that justify practical-effects stunt work. While it’s nominally an origin story for Charlize Theron’s character from Fury Road, played here by Anya Taylor-Joy and Alyla Browne, she’s kind of a big blank space at the center of the film.
To the extent that Furiosa works, it’s because of Chris Hemsworth as the villain, who is conducting commando raids on other Australian film productions to find additional scenery to chew. It’s an extremely effortful performance, though in a very different register than Reynolds/Jackman, and while he’s on the screen you can almost forget that everything about the plot and setting is an absolute mountain of horseshit.
Hemsworth’s job is a much heavier lift than the task Reynolds and Jackman face— arguably fittingly, given his size— because he doesn’t have the luxury of literally winking at the audience and saying “This is nonsense.” It’s more or less implicit in the role, though, starting with the fact that his character has named himself “Dementus.”
Though there is, perhaps, a sense in which Deadpool and Wolverine is attempting a higher degree of difficulty, in that they’re simultaneously trying to respect an enormous history of comic-book continuity while relentlessly taking the piss. The movie is trying to thread a really difficult needle, to some extent serving to wipe the slate clean after a series of not-entirely-successful Marvel films and also set up a bunch of hopefully-more-successful ones that will use scenarios and concepts that are lampooned here. I think that explains a lot of the mixed reaction from the more comics-engaged folks I’ve seen talk about this, from the crew at The Ringer to Timothy Burke here in blogdom.
As someone who is very much not invested in comic lore or Marvel continuity, though, I thought it was basically fine, and the kids had a grand time. The action sequences were, for the most part, well put together, factoring out the de rigueur CGI nonsense, and the cast were all really going for it. I’m sure I missed some jokes and references, but there were so many that I got more than enough as it was. The only real issue with it, in the end, was that the people making it know that they’re funny, and really dialed it up; had it been scaled back about 15%, I think I would’ve enjoyed it without the reservations I have about it in this universe.
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