TV & Movies

Because of the abundance of negative buzz on the internet and some truly awful trailers, I went into this movie with pretty low expectations. I came out not jubilant, but relieved.

Follow up:

The story is pretty straightforward. James Howlett is a fairly sickly boy in the 1800s. A shocking incident reveals that he is a mutant, with the ability to project bone claws from the spaces between his knuckles. He and his boyhood friend, Victor, flee and turn to a life of soldiering. They are recruited by the Weapon X program and things go wrong from there.

The film is a mix of things that are well done and things that are not. Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber give excellent performances. In fact, almost everyone in the film gives a good performance... when they're given something good to do. Ryan Reynolds is horribly underused. The few scenes he has as Wade Wilson are great. What the film does with Deadpool is not so great.

The action scenes are exciting. The CGI is inconsistent. I cannot fathom how the producers allowed the CGI "de-aging" of Patrick Stewart to be in the final print in the state it is. The final battle at Three Mile Island also has a lot of unbelievable CGI.

The film has little subtlety or cleverness (pretty much only where Jackman and Schreiber manage to squeeze it in). It is a high testosterone brute force film. The actors did their job, but it doesn't look like they got a lot of help from the director. For the most part the film meets its objectives and is an entertaining two hours. If just to watch the two leads square off, it is worth attending, a matinee.

There is a short post-credits scene.