Deader, Pooler

Year: 2018

Director: David Leitch

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hollywood is really hoping the world's refractory period for superhero movies is a short one, because Deadpool 2 arrives just three weeks after the massive, universe-shattering blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War, which came just two months after the box office juggernaut Black Panther. But even the shadow of Avengers can't quite obscure Deadpool 2, which is the followup to a film that was a massive hit exactly because it was a nasty-minded R-rated comedy sandwiched into the superheroic genre elements that have become so pervasive in movie theaters over the past decade.

Unfortunately, that means that Deadpool 2 isn't a superhero sequel but a comedy sequel, and those are quite a bit harder to pull off. All of Marvel's sequels have done better than their previous entries, because sequels don't have to worry about setting up their characters and conflicts, and just get to relax into a new adventure. Comedy sequels have to appease the audience by repeating their favorite jokes, only without the necessary element of surprise. Let's see how that went, shall we?

So far so consistent.

Warning: this plot synopsis and subsequent review contain SPOILERS for the first act of Deadpool 2; one major plot point that I couldn't care less about, and one minor reveal that I found way more interesting. But this really isn't a movie where the plot matters one whit, so I'm not bothered about it.

Deadpool 2 sees the return of its indestructible red-clad merc Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) just as his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) gets blown away by gangsters after a hit gone wrong. His mourning process (they were going to have a family, which is not a terrible idea for these people apparently) involves him couch-surfing at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters as a trainee member of the X-Men alongside returning D-list members Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who now has a girlfriend (Shioli Kutsuna) in one of those Hollywood stabs at LGBT diversity where gay people don't kiss or touch or talk, but just kind of stand next to each other.

His first mission involves defusing a situation involving a young mutant with anger issues and the ability to shoot flames out of his hand, the self-proclaimed Firefist (Julian Dennison of the terrific Hunt for the Wilderpeople). Deadpool's irreverent humor drives the kid away, just in time for the time-traveling terminator Cable (Josh Brolin) to arrive from the future with an eye on destroying the kid to prevent crimes he commits as an adult. Does Deadpool learn to overcome his grief and become the father he was always meant to be? Well, you'll just have to see, won't you?

Father, X-Man, friend to all gays... What can't this man do?

We would do well to sit down with the question that is all-important to comedy sequels: Is this schtick still funny? Obviously comedy is in the funny bone of the beholder, but my answer is a qualified yes. I've always loved meta humor in general, and the way it combines with pretty incisive analysis of superhero clichés continues to be satisfying (some times more than others - the movie really drops the ball with its obligatory Thanos joke). And there's plenty of new bits on hand here, including a delightful gross-out recurring gag with a pen, that are just solid examples of comedy writing, comic book movie or not. Sure, some jokes thud to the floor (there's a recurring bit about dubstep that I'm not certain is or was ever funny in any universe), but this is one of those modern movies that throw so much at the wall that most of sticks and you can ignore the rest.

Unfortunately, "the rest" includes most of the jokes that are picked up from the previous film. The biggest one of these being T.J. Miller's comic relief presence. It doesn't help that in the time between the previous movie and now, it has been revealed that the man himself is pretty much an unmitigated asshole, but his jokes have always felt like the blooper reel of a Judd Apatow movie, and they suck out all the air from the film every time he makes an appearance. And although the opening credits sequence is still quite fun, they're almost too shy to repeat the joke from the original movie and cut them short just as they're getting started.

All in all, however, I'm gonna put the humor in the plus column. The scales are tipped especially when you add the weight of new recruits Zazie Beetz and Julian Dennison, who own every scene they are in. Wilderpeople proved that Dennison has the chops and I'm glad he's gotten a bigger platform for his unique brand of Kiwi bluster, but as someone who doesn't watch Atlanta, Beetz is a new encounter for me, and it has been excessively pleasant. Her colossal confidence and screen presence will superglue your eyes to the screen, and her action sequences, which involve the superpower of "luck" creating a series of Rube Goldberg Final Destination deaths around her as she struts by, are truly something to behold.

She's basically what would happen if we put 70's Pam Grier in a superhero movie, and that's the highest praise I can give to any human being.

And though Domino's action is clearly the best, Deadpool 2 doesn't disgrace director David Leitch's history with John Wick and Atomic Blonde at any point. Deadpool's indestructibility allows him to soar through the tropes of action cinema just as easily as superhero movies, circumventing traditional fight setpieces in his own idiosyncratic fashion. Probably the best example (and the one shown in the trailers) is the part where it seems like he's deflecting all the bullets Cable shoots at him by hitting them aside with his katanas, only to reveal that most of them have hit their mark because it's, like, super hard to hit a bullet with a sword. By lowering the personal stakes as to his health and well-being, Deadpool 2 has opened the floodgates to a cartoony sense of fun that keeps these scenes buoyant and propulsive throughout.

So, the comedy and action are present, which is really all you need. Unfortunately, Deadpool has two hours to fill and what it chooses to sandwich in between the fun parts is more than a bit irksome. There's repeated use of a ridiculous heaven-esque dreamscape that delivers foreshadowing and character insight on a silver platter without actually having to earn it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the movie's more dramatic sequences. Ryan Reynolds sells Deadpool's emotional arc, because he really is a solid actor, but the drama here is much too maudlin and self-serious to pair well with the fratty comedy the rest of the movie delivers. There's no foundation for this type of scene in the Deadpool universe, and we get a lot of them here to crumble around us.

Also, sweet baby Jesus, there are so many random soundtrack needle drops in this movie. In the climactic third act sequence it feels like we get a dozen ironic pop songs jammed into our ears, to the point that I'm legitimately surprised we didn't get a joke comparing that scene to Suicide Squad. Some of these juxtapositions of bubblegum pop and action work quite well, but the movie is too flooded with them for the few great moments to actually have any potency.

Neither of these flaws are film-ruining, but they certainly drag this sequel to a lower level than its predecessor, in spite of quite a few things that are working even better than before. I can't wait to see the story continue with the exciting new characters it has added, it's satisfying to see what a Deadpool movie can do with an actual budget, and I had fun. That's really all I need, but there's just those niggling problems that refuse to go away.

TL;DR: Deadpool 2 is a satisfying, fun hunk of diminishing returns.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1359
Reviews In This Series
Deadpool (Miller, 2016)
Deadpool 2 (Leitch, 2018)

We Could Leave This Town And Run Forever

Year: 2005
Director: Andrew Douglas
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Jimmy Bennett
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Here we are, folks. The end of the line. Well, actually that’s not accurate. This is my stop. The line continues to stretch on into oblivion, because huckster filmmakers will keep on exploiting the Amityville name until either the art of cinema comes to an end or the heat death of the universe plunges us into eternal darkness, whichever comes first. What we can – for lack of a better word – call the “pure” Amityville franchise ends here, with the high-gloss studio remake of 2005, smack dab in the middle of the tremendous new millennium run of godawful remakes of classic horror titles. Most of these were shepherded into existence by Michael Bay’s production company Platinum Dunes, and oh – would you look at that title card.

Generally speaking, remakes tend to put to rest even the most robust of franchises. We haven’t revisited Crystal Lake or Elm Street since they were interred by their respective Platinum Dunes reboots, and a franchise as rickety as Amityville couldn’t stack up to those giants. So it went the way of Freddy and Jason. Mostly.

You see, unfortunately for the general populace, six years later turbo-indie filmmakers cottoned on to the fact that a town’s name ain’t copyrightable, so slapping the word into the title of their chintzy microbudget ghost project was a ticket to earning a couple extra bucks. Since 2011, one or two faux-Amityville projects have seeped into the market from its darkest, dankest corners every year, with a whopping four dropped onto the world like an anvil in 2016 alone (The Amityville Terror, Amityville: No Escape, Amityville: Vanishing Point, and The Amityville Legacy. I’m exhausted just listing them).

As much of a completist as I am, I don’t consider these universally ignored, artistically anemic works as movies, let alone viable entries into a dotty but venerable franchise. I feel no shame about ignoring them and sparing my already ailing patience. You wouldn’t want to read that much useless bile anyway, and I’ve already wasted my breath on the little-seen back half of this marathon, which nobody needed to be warned away from anyway. So! The buck stops here.

The house screamed “Get Out!” and for once, I’m going to heed that warning.

I daresay we’re pretty familiar with the plot of The Amityville Horror at this point. In the mid-70’s,, newlywed couple Kathy (Melissa George) and George Lutz (Ryan Reynolds) find a home with a price they can’t refuse in Amityville, Long Island. They move in with Kathy’s three children (the most important being played by Chloë Grace Moretz in her film debut) and naught but 28 days later are driven out by the same demonic forces that caused a boy to murder his family with a  shotgun just a year earlier, who this time have their sights set on corrupting George.

The same general plot beats and scare gags play out, with a few notable exceptions:

1. The addition of a rooftop setpiece they loved so damn much they used it twice
2. Liberal application of a shirtless, wet-whenever-possible Ryan Reynolds
3. Not only is the ghost Jodie not a sinister invisible presence, she might as well get third billing
4. It’s hella dumb.

Platinum Dunes strikes again.

To be honest, I was convinced that a remake with a shirtless Ryan Reynolds could only have been an improvement on the original Amityville Horror. I found that film incredibly tedious and lackluster, and the run time of the new version was already a massive improvement. The propaganda artists who wrote the back of the box would have you believe that the film is 90 minutes long, but it clocks out at a fleet hour and twenty, lopping a good 40 minutes off the 1979 entry.

While that was always and continues to be the right decision, every other choice the filmmakers made seems to have been the wrong one. I’m completely used to and even enjoy some sequels and remakes where the ethos is “the same thing, only worse,” but when the original thing was already pretty bad, this all just becomes incredibly punishing.

Amityville ’05 is mirthlessly stupid, top to bottom. It has one of my favorite hallmarks of dumb movies (Melissa George reads aloud the headlines on the microfiche she’s investigating, in case you weren’t paying attention) but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, baby! This is a film where shining a flashlight into someone’s face knocks them over like a bowling pin, and where their solution to the haunted house problem is to take a boat and sail to the middle of a lake (in full view of the house, mind you), as if they saw the end of Friday the 13th and were impressed by Alice’s genius decision-making.

Literally, they just sit on a boat and wait to see if Ryan Reynolds decides to kill them or not. This is beyond stupid Horror Movie Decision-Making, it borders on literal child abuse.

It’s hard to pinpoint the primary problem with the movie, because there’s just so damn many of them. The one that bothered me the most though was how brutally unsubtle the whole thing is. I already touched on how Jodie has been converted from an offscreen menacing presence to a bloated CGI-laden spook who pops in every ten minutes or so for some of the goofiest fright gags you ever did see, but another scene that really ruffles my feathers is the following:

Ryan Reynolds is outside, chopping wood and being sexy. Melissa George runs out, frantically asking where their daughter is! It has been in no way established that he was supposed to be watching her. For all we knew, she’s been chilling in the house this whole time. But now, we’re suddenly supposed to care about this dunderheaded scene that leads to a frightfully silly non-scare that assumes that because Chloë Grace is standing on a boat, she must be in danger(?). None of it makes any sense, but it’s so brutally injected into the screenplay that it isn’t even supported by any sort of context. It just is, and what it is is moronic.

I will admit that there’s one incredibly effective jump scare buried in the mire here, so the movie has that going for it. But the rest of the scares are so effortful that they misjudge their impact and clang uselessly against the screen. The camera goes wild, swopping and whirling in an unnecessarily complicated display that hopes to distract us from the fact that refrigerator magnets moving around isn’t a super scary thing.

The one thing that could have salvaged any sort of atmosphere was the lead performances. Ryan Reynolds is a performer I generally like, and Melissa George is… Melissa George. But they both fumble the ball here. Reynolds especially lets his beard do most of the acting for him. He’s charming in the first act as a handsome, hopeful newlywed, but his descent into madness is accompanied by some of the worst horror movie screaming I’ve ever seen. He yips like a dog, adding extra aftershock screams after long pauses, each yelp a painful stab into your brain.

Amityville ’05 is just exhausting. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it has the wisdom to use Reynolds’ shirtless body as a crutch during some of the shakier scenes, but other than maybe The Amityville Curse, this is the biggest waste of time in the entire franchise, and that is not something I expected to be saying when the marathon finally swung back around to a movie with an actual budget.

TL;DR: The Amityville Horror is a horror film by blunt force trauma, a brutally unsubtle exercise in pointless remaking.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1303
Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

We Don't Need Another Hero

Year: 2016

Director: Tim Miller

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Say, has anybody noticed that there seems to be quite a few of these superhero pictures coming out lately? In the eight years since Iron Man, Hollywood has essentially converted into one of those baseball pitching machines, lobbing out comic book movies at a steadily increasing clip. Some are home runs (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers) and some are whiffs (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, goddamn Fantastic Four), but at this point superheroes are still a money tree with diamond fruit, and studios will keep shaking it until it’s kindling.

Deadpool bills itself as an anti-superhero movie, a saucy, R-rated pastiche that will breathe new life into the hopelessly self-serious format. Seeing how snark is practically a character in Marvel’s Joss Whedon-tinged Phase 2, this isn’t exactly how it works. And Deadpool is a superhero story the same way (500) Days of Summer is a love story. Sure, it’s caustic and self-aware, but it’s more firmly encamped in the genre than it’s willing to admit. Nevertheless, Deadpool is quite easily the best 20th Century Fox Marvel movie in at least a decade.

Let’s rock ‘n roll.

In Deadpool, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a fast-talking mercenary madly in love with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). When he discovers he has terminal cancer, he signs up for an aggressive treatment from the wicked Ajax (Ed Skrein), which activates a latent mutation that gives him miraculous healing powers but scars his face beyond recognition. He narrowly escapes the institution and is now hellbent on finding Ajax, getting a cure, and winning back his lady love. On hand to help are two benchwarmer X-Men, Colossus (Stefan Kupicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand).

Someone in the X-Men publicity department probably got fired for that code name.

Deadpool is a strange beast. Trying to package it under any kind of defining label is like trying to sculpt with butter on an August afternoon. It’s a slippery, misshapen behemoth that desperately strains to break the mold but passes out from exertion before it quite accomplishes that. I have quite a few bones to pick with Deadpool, and I’ll get to them forthwith, but I just that you should know that, for all its braying and its lumpy stature, it’s a damn entertaining film and sometimes that’s all that matters.

First off, let’s discuss that R-rating. This is mostly used for good (if your definition of “good” involves vigorous holiday sex and a solid slate of absurdist gags that I shall dub The Masturbation Variations). It’s bloodier than your average superhero flick, and a strip club scene actually displays topless women As divested as I am of a particular interest in the female anatomy, I always respect realistic depictions of topless bars instead of the sanitized sitcom hellscape of women endlessly gyrating in their bras and panties.

But despite its triumphant heralding of its loosened sexual mores, Deadpool feels oddly tame. Two actresses (the ones who are actually paid good money to be here) have scenes written specifically into the film that require exposed breasts, but they’re demurely obscured. And certain key moments of violence are deliberately sequestered offscreen to the degree that it’s almost impossible to comprehend the action. My question is this: Why include these scenes at all if you’re too afraid to actually engage with them? Aside from Deadpool’s vigorous usage of the F-word like a dog demolishing a new chew toy, there seems to be a discernible reluctance to truly push the envelope. Sure, it’s salacious, but it’s barely American Pie level naughty. Again, this wouldn’t be a problem if the movie weren’t so obsessed with announcing how ribald it is.

This is possibly a result of producers having no clue how Deadpool was going to be received and attempting to temper its personality. This cluttered, acerbic tale is halfway to where it wants to be, whether it’s sex, violence, Deadpool’s scar makeup, or even its approach toward women. Trapped in limbo between archetypical damsels in distress and broad-as-hell mistranslated Feminist Manifesto Super Warriors, the female presence in this movie utterly fails to make any impression at all (save Brianna Hildebrand, playing a teen stereotype with unrivaled glee). However, now that Deadpool is raking in Hunger Games numbers, I hope the sequel will be more willing to embrace its rating, settling into the truly unique spectrum the character deserves.

Although I’m undoubtedly a gentleman, I’m not NOT lobbying for full frontal Ryan Reynolds. You know. For equality.

I think you get the picture. Deadpool is a little all over the place. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a shot in the arm. If the Marvel Cinematic Universe is Oasis, Deadpool is Blink-182, a snotty and hyperactive answer to the superhero doldrums. Its humor is uncommonly divisive, but that’s indubitably a good thing. It’s a facet of the in-your-face gonzo attitude that the film intermittently achieves.

The humor is immature, gloating, wacky, gross, and uncompromising in tis vicious assault on the fourth wall and if you’re not ready for it, it will rub you the wrong way. I’m just saying, if you’re wearing a polo and chinos into the multiplex, this may not be the film for you. But as a childish volcano of sardonic, biting comedy, it’s a remarkably fun ride. Listing jokes is a hallmark of dull criticism, so I shall refrain from doing so, but let’s just say there may or may not be a Deadpool rap song on the soundtrack. It’s rad, and my inner high schooler had a blast.

Deadpool owes everything it has to one Mssr. Ryan Reynolds. He is wholly devoted to the role, harnessing all his inherent charm to sell the ceaseless antics. In the hands of a lesser actor, Deadpool would be garish disaster, but here he supplies an undertone of flinty rage to color the emotionally flavorless aspects of the script. As it sands, he rules the film, clobbering the fourth wall with an elegant Brechtian flourish.

Deadpool’s bouncy tone is captured well in a refreshingly small-scale story that, while overpopulated with comic book movie tropes, allows its characters to breathe without facing some preternaturally epic, sky-gobbling menace. It’s a slick, unstable film that doesn’t visually challenge its audience, but thanks to Reynolds it’s nevertheless a relentless success. Just like The Force Awakens, it leaves the door open for a much better sequel, but its messiness is still a blast of nuclear proportions.

TL;DR: Deadpool has its fair share of problems, but it's so energizingly fun that they're easy to ignore.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1111
Reviews In This Series
Deadpool (Miller, 2016)
Deadpool 2 (Leitch, 2018)