I had promised a few weeks ago that I’d review Deadpool 2, and have not thus far for a pretty simple reason: the old adage, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. But I wanted to do some “quick hits” for recent releases I don’t have too much to say about, so here they be. In case you couldn’t guess, I have Moviepass. I’m not crazy, I wouldn’t pay to see all these!
Deadpool 2– I am clearly not the target audience for this, but I will say I didn’t find it funny at all. Mainly I don’t care for that kind of humor; I like more ironic, mean-spirited humor, and this is just stupid humor that makes Dumb & Dumber look highbrow. If I may, it’s the pretentiousness and disingenuousness of it all; they claim “Wade”/DP is the hitman with no filter, but rather than make fun of everyone and everything, he makes raunchy jokes that are so toothless and PC in nature that the only things he can basically pun about are dicks and non-sequitors. Among Wade’s diverse and eclectic friends we have a blind senior, a weaselly nerd, Josh Brolin, a little fat boy from New Zealand, and a giant afro-sporting black woman. He usually makes one joke about each of them to make us say “how edgy,” and then never pushes the issue again. Mainly he’s just an annoying douche, or Ryan Reynolds playing himself. He calls Brolin “Thanos” once, which is funny, but he should’ve done it over and over and kept bringing up the gauntlet, if they wanted to push the ludicrousness of it all.
Contrast this with Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket; an equal opportunity bigot, he viciously makes fun of absolutely everybody regardless of their color or creed, but the humor is in how he keeps pushing it over and over past anyone’s comfort level. Gomer Pyle is a lazy fat body he hates for the entire duration of the film (well, the first half anyway), as opposed to Wade’s one light jab about the fat boy, who then becomes his BFF. The humor is too socially conscious to be offensive, so instead goes for endless raunchy sex jokes, and I don’t care for that. I like humor that shocks and makes me say, “Boy, that was a clever one.” The story was also all over the map with a hokey and saccharine ending, and a retread of the first film. I did like the X-Force sequence, somewhat, including The Vanisher aka Invisible Boy from Mystery Men (“He’s not here, he’s just late, isn’t he?”), and the one joke about how Cable was short and “not tall, like in the comics.” But that was about it. Ennhhh! PS: Peter was funny, but should not have been called Peter. Like, why? There are enough Peters in the Marvel Universe already; I can already think of three in the MCU, and two in the Fox X-Men-verse alone, who are both supposed to be “Piotr”! Put a moratorium on that name in Marvel; like how multiple TV protagonists in the early Aughts were all called “Jack.” For fuck’s sake!
Solo– No thank you. I can see why nobody showed up to see it. It had two major problems, as far as I could tell. For starters, it’s such a cookie-cutter cliched hero’s journey narrative, but it’s long, boring and pointless. What I didn’t like was the sense that Lucasfilm, rather than try to craft an engaging narrative and hope you like it, assumed everyone would show up anyway and feed them cash, so they pushed the worst elements of The Last Jedi again. I’m talking about the lame characters you have to like and the endless cheer associated with the Disney brand: non-stop quips, an annoying youthful lead, a sassy female protagonist, Woody Harrelson as the wise old man, and plenty of kooky and colorful aliens to market as toys. It’s commercialism by design fed down your throat to make the most vanilla product possible, and I hate that. I did not care for The Last Jedi, and although we of course do not agree with some of the racism and sexism associated with the complaints of it, I do have to think part of the hate for Rose/Kelly Tran’s character in that film was due to her not being properly introduced into the narrative as an organic character, but rather being subjected to the audience as if Lucasfilm was insisting upfront we have to embrace her, or else. Every character in Solo was like that.
The second big problem was, I couldn’t buy Alden Ehrenreich as Solo at all. What I mean was, I couldn’t for one second accept him as young Harrison Ford. There is an interesting theory that when an actor plays a real person, they mold their identity with what we know about the public figure, and it creates a third character in our mind, who we accept. This is a bad example, but Cuba Gooding as OJ kind of worked, because he didn’t play OJ at all; he played himself, so we accepted a variation of Cuba’s persona with OJ’s misdeeds in that fictional version of the story. Alden, on the other hand, is not playing Ford, but a character who’s already been in four movies. The problem is, Solo is so closely ingrained in our minds as Ford, that we cannot separate the two. And he plays him trying to mimic his mannerisms sometimes, doing his own thing other times, and it creates a disconnect. They should’ve just gotten that dude who does impressions of him on Youtube (Anthony Ingruber?) and just done an imitation of young Ford outright; couldn’t be worse. When Alden squeals with his whiny voice and tries to smirk, it just makes you think of how it’s not Ford’s commanding bellows (“It belongs in a museum!”) and trademark crooked smile. Anyway, hard to sit through, superficial crap, big pass.
In the meantime, here’s Anthony as Ford: look at him, they’re twins!
Hereditary– called the ‘scariest movie ever,” I don’t know about that, but it does come close. A dysfunctional family mourns a recently deceased Grandma, and when the disturbed daughter goes to party with the older son, and has an allergic reaction to walnut cake- things start to get really, really bad. Wow, this was creepy and unpleasant. I will say this: don’t go in expecting the scariest film you’ve ever seen; it’s not jump scares, but extremely upsetting, unpleasant, “ew” horror. It’s really really gross. I don’t care for that kind of horror, and I found myself looking away from the screen often not in fear, but in disgust. It didn’t help that a large part of it involved my own personal phobia- dead and decapitated birds- so I was having a hard time keeping it together to focus when they kept deferring to those parts, but not because I was scared out of my wits. Another thing adding to that- and I’m really not trying to be mean, please forgive me if I offend- but boy, that was one of the most homely film casts I’ve ever seen. Toni Collette (giving an admittedly great, hyper-manic grand guignol performance) and Gabriel Byrne are fine actors, but I don’t think anyone would accuse them of being “good looking.” The two kids, however, were so weird and creepy looking that I found it extra disturbing and quease-inducing, like Gummo. Scary and disturbing in a Lars Von Trier or Funny Games sort of way, not Paranormal Activity. Horror has to have an element of “fun,” to me, and this was no fun to watch, so it’s hard to recommend. Your mileage may vary, but it was certainly engaging and well shot, I’ll give it that.
Adrift– This one I liked, funny enough. So ridiculous and sappy, and Sam Clayfin can’t act to save his life, but it was at least “a movie” and not a descent into misery or a sludge through non-offensive brand building like the other flicks. A couple gets lost at sea, and circumstances get dire. Reminded me a lot of Me Before You, I guess for obvious reasons, rather than Open Water or Deep Blue Sea or whatever. Tense at times, but more in a kind of relaxing, predictable thriller/romance way than something where your heart rate gets above 85. Nice, trite fare for anyone who doesn’t want to see the Disney marketing arm spew out its Spring products. Thumbs up for not freaking me out!
And there you have it. If you enjoyed any of these, you’re a better dude or dudette than I. I guess I’m too cynical; or, too uptight to let Deadpool take the piss out of my beloved X-Men universe. I recommend you go see Infinity War again instead of any of these, which never seems to get old. I will be getting a few columns up every week this summer; I’ll be doing an all-time greatest characters and greatest covers list, and I will get more single issue comic reviews up (like Doomsday Clock, which I’ve been wanting to look at issue-by-issue), so look out. More fun than you can shake a didgeridoo at!