Serenity

Written at the time of the film's release...

Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) Enjoyable, if violent, genre-bendin' space-farin' Western spinning off from the one season wonder "Firefly." But Serenity (that's the name of the ship) passes the crucial test of movies that make the leap from small to big screen—you don't need to have seen the series to "get" the concept and enjoy the film (probably because the concepts are so familiar). Sharply written and directed by series creator Whedon, and played by the regular cast, it boasts an intensely underplaying Chiwetel Ejiofor as a government operative who ritualistically silences outliers.

And outliers are exactly what the crew of the "Firefly"-class "Serenity" is comprised of; pirates, soldiers of fortune, outlaws, the scrappy veterans of the Galaxy's last civil war, who bounce from system to system dodging government entanglements and making a living by lying, cheating and stealing. Plus, they do good while doing bad.

The conceit of staging a Western in the infinitely wide-open spaces isn't new. "Star Trek" was sold to NBC as being "Wagon Train to the Stars"--not exactly true, but the suits got the point, "Star Wars" used Han Solo as a space cowboy ala Hondo (which Chewbacca as his faithful dog...or horse), and the "Wars" rip-off Battle Beyond the Stars was "The Magnificent 7 in Space." There isn't that much of a light-speed leap from horse-opera to space-opera. After all, the umbrella-genres of westerns and sci-fi can encompass all sorts of story-themes from Shakespeare to cleverly disguised issues of the day.

The plot for Serenity back-tracks a bit* to catch movie-goers up with the story of fugitives River Tam (Summer Glau) and her doctor-brother Simon (Sean Maher) and then resolves the conflicts their paid passage aboard Captain Mal Reynolds' (Nathan Fillion) ship of fools has created, and turns River from loose cannon on deck to a reliable asset. Along the way the crew stumbles on a gone-wrong planet-wide government experiment being kept under wraps. And since they're being pursued by "the op," anyway, they "aim to misbehave."

The characters are broadly drawn, easily discerned, and everyone is given significant plot-time (with the exception of Morena Baccarin's space-zen-hooker Inara, whose role was edited for time). Though not a success at the box office, it did spur interest in the series and kicked its box-set collection into hyper-drive. Though Whedon constantly discounts it, the crew of "Serenity" may fly again.

2020 aside: I'd still like to see it, as the film inspired a deep-dive into the TV series for me, although getting Fillion back would be a task—not to mention writer-director Whedon. And, given how everybody's aged a bit, it's going to have to surmount the "Star Trek movie-issue" of providing a sufficient reason for everybody getting back together, assuming that characters have gone separate ways and forged bonds elsewhere. Still, it was Whedon working on something he WANTED to work on and that usually entails his best work. I think a lot of it has to do with that I became a fan after it died...All that there was had already been done. And it was finite.

Maybe it's best to move on. 

* In a film-starting series of illusions that nest together like Matryoshka dolls.

Deadpool 2

Mucking Up the Timeline
or
"Too Far? I Went Too Far."

Deadpool 2 begins with a bang. "The Merc with a Mouth" (Ryan Reynolds) is alone in his apartment—in full uniform (does he do that a lot or just special occasions?)—kvetching about Wolverine again and how not only Logan was riding his coattails with an "R" Rating, but how the stupid "snickter" one-upped him by dying in that movie. And so he makes himself a couple of Hot Pockets in the micro-wave, turns on the gas on his oven and lies down on top of a few convenient drums of gasoline, lights a cigarette and blows himself to bits.

Okay. Everybody go home. 

Well, there is a movie after that and it's good in fits and starts with the occasional laugh-out-loud line ("Who came up with that? Probably some guy who can't draw feet"), but if you're discriminating and want to keep the rosy-blood-red glow of the original in your mind, you might want to skip this one. Yes, it has Josh Brolin as Cable, Zazie Beets as Domino, an appearance by Juggernaut and even the formation of an "X-Force". (Big Spoiler: They almost all die. Nyuck-nyuck).

In fact, a lot of people die. Important people in the narrative. 

And then, within the movie, they fix everything and everything turns out all right.* 

Less "nyuck" than "yuck." There are no stakes in Deadpool 2...at all (curiously, you did in the first one, even though it has the same air of larky nihilism). It's what happens when you throw in a time-travel ability into a comedy. Hit the chrono-switch and fix everything that might be risky...and it gives you a chance to repeat some jokes. As Deadpool says at one point "Now that's just lazy writing."

Actually, he says that a couple times. That really IS some lazy writing.

"Derivative? NO, it's satrirical!"

Anyway, after Deadpool blows himself up—without killing his roommate Blind Al (Leslie Uggams)—well, I'll let the 20th Century Fox Plot Synopsis tell the story:

After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Mayberry's hottest bartender while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the Yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor - finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World's Best Lover.

No. No, that's not the story at all...

Anyway, in the movie I saw, DP blows himself up after something depressing happens—it's mocked in the Bondian opening credits, which ends with the tag "directed by one of the guys who killed the dog in John Wick—and X-Man Colossus puts DP's parts in a Glad-Bag and drags him to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters to try and pull himself together. He even offers him a membership in the X-Man ("trainee" everybody has to add). Deadpool isn't buying it. "I'm not 'X-Men' material: first off, I'm not a virgin." Nor does he want to be (as he puts it later) "a dated metaphor for racism in the 60's." Good points, all.

But, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) drag him to a "Mutant Re-education Center" on the X-jet where one of the students, Russell Collins (Julian Dennison, the kid from Hunt for the Wilderpeople), who calls himself "Firefist" us having a literal melt-down, meaning he wants to melt the orphanage down and kill the administrator and a couple of the orderlies for good measure. The other X-people want to try and corral him, but Wade wants to talk to the kid and try and calm him down that way. How well does that go? The movie's only 30 minutes old, so you tell me.

No, it does not go well and Firefist and Deadpool are sent to the Icebox—a prison for mutants—wearing those Universal Power Dampeners that seem to work on everybody despite them having wildly different powers. There, Cable (Brolin) enters the scene because he's come back in time to kill the kid because he'll cause something devastating in the future and blah blah "killing Hitler as a child" blah. So, it's up to our titular hero to save the kid he barely knows, even if he does become a fiery Hitler, because...plot.

It's here that I kinda checked out except for a few meta-chuckles along the way (sorry, "meta" is DC) because as much as I like nihilism in movies, I don't like my sociopaths to be warm and fuzzy ones (maybe that's why I didn't find John Wick funny or worthy of attention). I prefer Deadpool to be an outlier and an unhinged cannon who's not much of a "joiner" so much as a blaster-aparterer. If the character works, it's because he succeeds despite himself...and because, basically, you can't kill him, you can only kill his box-office. So, the whole "team-up" thing doesn't work for me with him.

Nor does the whole idea that he can do anybody any good except if they need to be perforated. He's a berserker, nothing less and nothing more, and the fact that he's a super-expositionist and meta-commentator makes him even more so. I mean, no fourth wall is safe around him, be it by mayhem or malarkey. It will crumble like the second weekend receipts for a DC movie.

This is a problem. Not, of course, if you're just there to guffaw at the more obvious jokes or the clumps of celebrity cameo's (and, of course, Matt Damon is one of them because he's in everything) if one cares. Truth is Deadpool 2 is full of material that has a very brief shelf-life without shoring it up with anything that might resonate or push the franchise further. It's merely a placeholder where nothing much matters, doesn't expand the Deadpool character or his story-arc. On top of the that, the fights are sloppy—the whole thing's kind of sloppy.

The most repeated line—besides "trainee"—is "Family is an "F" word.

But, so is "Facetious". And "Fragile". And..."Failure".

* Actually, that happens in the "credits" scenes, so stick around for that. You can fix and fore-shadow anything in post-credit scenes.

Deadpool

*Blam* Bad Deadpool! *Blam* (Uh!) GOOD Deadpool!
or
Taking the Hero Out of Super-Hero and Putting the Meta Into Meta-Human

From the generic credited Main Title, crafted like one of those Avengers-ending still-life's littered with in-jokes, Deadpool hits the ground kicking the tropes and biting the superhero genre that feeds it.

And thank God. The whole super-hero "thing" has started becoming stale and musty of late and Deadpool clears the cob-webs away...with a machine-pistol.

Maybe you don't remember Deadpool. In the comics, he was created by Marvel artist Rob ("I can't draw feet") Liefield to be as lethal as Wolverine and as chatty as Spider-Man. The one thing that made Deadpool unique (qualifier, DC had an earlier character named "Ambush Bug" that does this, too) in the Marvel Universe is that Deadpool is aware that he is a fictional super-hero in a comic book. He was a mutant, a mercenary and he was a bit insane. He has appeared in movies before—as played by Ryan Reynolds in the weak Wolverine: Origins, where he looked like this: 

That's right, they sewed his mouth shut. Now, since Deadpool is known in the comics as "The Merc with the Mouth" why didn't he have one in W:O? Probably because the character is supposed to be insane and funny and that would have stolen the movie away from the star-character and ripped the franchise right out from under Hugh Jackman's feet. We could not have that, so DP got zippered. Bad Deadpool.

But, Ryan Reynolds wasn't happy. He was unhappy enough that he was determined to make a fully-throated Deadpool feature, and since Wolverine: Origins was no one's idea of a good movie, nothing really stood in his way.

Except, of course, for time and money. Reynolds worked with script-writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (of Zombieland) to come up with a rollicking script, more in keeping with what he had in mind, truer to the fourth-wall-exploding, incorrigible Deadpool of the comics, all of which seemed beyond the imaginations of the studio execs at Fox, whose super-hero experience had more to do with the stolid X-men movies and the egregious Fantastic 4 film (and their man-handling of that project revealed that their view was so narrow-minded and cookie-cutter as to be self-destructive). Bad Fox.

The final impediment to the project—demand—was taken care of when leaked test footage of what the producing team had in mind was released to the internet, and the fan-boy whoops could be heard and taken seriously enough to invest in a feature. The result was your standard super-hero movie, with its insistence on a "By Hrothgar's Hammer, I shall be revenged!" plot and a loosening of the moral hand-cuffs (which most of these movies have experimented with, anyway) to make Deadpool a complete anti-hero. The difference is the tone, which feels more like an action movie starring Jim Carrey in full antic (which would be The Mask, actually, but sped up about 150%).

Wade Wilson (Reynolds) is a slightly unhinged mercenary-for-hire with mad skills and no filters. He meets his potential damsel-in-distress, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin—who I've always suspected would have been Joss Whedon's Wonder Woman if that project had come to fruition) and they have an idyllic, if randy, year before Wade finds out he has terminal cancer ("Cancer's only in my liver, lungs, prostate, and brain. All things I can live without"). Vanessa wants to fight it, but Wade is just as determined that she doesn't have to suffer through it with him, so he skips out.

He probably should have stayed. In a desperate attempt to stay alive and go back to Vanessa, he is offered a devil's deal: given his mercenary instincts, he is approached by a clandestine organization that offers him a cure, but also, a bit of an improvement—turning him into a mutant. But, getting there amounts to inhuman torture and Wade emerges from the forced treatment with a pulped face and an undying rage—the "improvement" being the ability to heal from any wound, no matter how severe, —and the intent to kill anyone associated with his procedure, focusing on the mutant in charge of the operation, a sadistic brute named Frances (Ed Skrein).

Frances?  Frances!?

The term "berserker" is the best term for Deadpool. The movie's opening sequence has him in the middle of a curiously abandoned freeway (following a multi-vehicle smash-up that he initiated) attacking a gaggle of Frances' goons with only 12 bullets in his arsenal. He makes every bullet count, as he counts, mouthing sporadic one-liner non-sequitirs to taunt and distract the bad-guys, while amusing the audience (and himself). It is only the intervention of X-Men Colossus (CGI'd and voiced by Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (no, really, that's a real superhero name and she's played by Brianna Hildebrand) that stops him from decimating every single bad guy within several miles of empty city highway. They want to "reform" Deadpool by taking him back to Mutant Academy to meet with Professor "X" ("McAvoy or Stewart?" is Deadpool's reply).

From there, the movie pretty much runs the well-entrenched path of super-hero movies—revenge and redemption, which it does not take seriously at all. Nor should it. Something entrenched is in a rut. Comics (or should I say "graphic literature") are selling less than ever, at the same time that it seems to also want to be taken seriously and profoundly. This is reflected in movies made from comics sources, which started out wonderfully wicked in their debuts and then turn inert and careful by the sequel. You can take chances on the first one—and if it's successful, well, profits have to be taken seriously. Risks are fewer when it involves money.

And movies are duller. Deadpool is not dull, not for any stretch (well, except for the drawn-out mutation process scenes because the villains aren't entertaining...at all), and although the overall arc is much the same as any superhero movie, it's unrelenting goofiness at it's (and everything else's) expense feels like a tonic. In much the same way as Guardians of the Galaxy knew it was treading a lighter path and did a bit more stirring of ingredients in order to get the mix of grim n' gritty and comedy right, Deadpool throws in more nuts. And chops them. A lot.

As for "g n' g", Deadpool is very, very violent and is rated "R" for its splattering heads and severed limbs and constant "F"-bombing—it's certainly more violent that The Hateful 8. "So, Mr. Inconsistency, why hate on "our boy" QT and like this movie?" Because this has a sense of humor and The Hateful 8 doesn't. TH8 only thinks it has a sense of humor, but it's only actually a sense of outrageousness. They're not the same thing. Outrageousness can be funny if its satiric, but there's no satire in TH8. It doesn't want to make a point, it just wants to be outrageous, ("man"). Deadpool takes nothing seriously, but The Hateful 8 makes the mistake of thinking itself profound, like so much post modern pop culture does these days. Deadpool is clever. The Hateful 8 only thinks it is.

The fan-boys out there are ecstatic because they "finally" have an "R"-rated movie based on a comic book (quite forgetting American Splendor (which they never read), Watchmen, 300, Road to Perdition, Blade, and the Sin City movies). Deadpool will also appeal to those with ADHD and generally short attention spans.*

I plead guilty, as well. I laughed. I laughed a lot. GOOD Deadpool.

 

* There's even a line about that: "Right now your date is saying 'My boy-friend told me this was a superhero movie, but this asshole just turned this bad guy into a kebab.' Surprise, this is a different kind of superhero movie."