Saturday, February 13, 2016

don't mess with him


Some films, although anchored on a very thin plot, manage to reward their viewers with their rich sense of mythology, depth of characterization, and novelty. A perfect example is Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Imagine there was a time we were so engrossed on watching a little man trying to put a ring inside a volcano for almost 10 hours. “Deadpool,” the latest Marvel film directed by Tim Miller, also has a tissue-thin plot. Unfortunately, it was not able to duplicate what Jackson did with those three long movies. But, oh, it was so much fun. Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool is bursting with humor, most of them really dirty you need to keep it away from little kids. This film also makes you forget Reynolds has two superhero movies before this. And although the jokes are mostly hehe instead of haha, this film has its charms. Case in point: our foul-mouthed superhero has a habit of breaking the fourth wall. For everyone’s understanding, that means he gets to talk to the theater audience, slows down an action scene to think out loud, or cues the music to his liking. But this narrative device was not manipulated to its full potential. Aside from a totally boring nemesis called Ajax, my biggest issue with this film is how it re-tooled Colossus. His characterization in the previous X-Men films is far from the robotic and seemingly dull Colossus we have in this latest version. And instead of a hulking mass of metal, he looks rubbery, thus, he looks CGI cheap. The director’s devotion to the source material is pitch-perfect. He gets the comics’ spirit. But this reverence has also translated the end product into something like a three-panel comic strip instead of a full-length movie. I felt betrayed. After all, I paid for a movie, right?

[ photo borrowed from this site ]

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