I watched and enjoyed Deadpool and it took me about three hours to start feeling vaguely let down.
I still do love that there's four named female characters (who don't ever talk to each other, so) who have different body types and personalities.
I do love that they got Deadpool's voice right. It's simultaneously really distinctive, and so easy to get wrong.
I legitimately enjoyed myself while watching it, because I felt like it gave me everything I wanted from a Deadpool movie. And then I started to feel bummed, because I felt like it was built by numbers to be What Audiences Want in a Deadpool Movie, without ever pushing the boundaries of what such a movie could be.
Despite advertising him as 'pansexual', Deadpool's sexuality in this movie is indistinguishable from 100% heterosexuality with some 'funny' homophobia.
And. I don't want to say you're required to advertise your sexuality all the time, lest someone mistake you for straight but. Isn't that kind of Deadpool's thing?
Things Deadpool could have done, in no particular order, in varying degrees of studio acceptableness:
- Looked like he was enjoying, rather than regretting, being pegged.
- Had a sexual history with someone who wasn't young, female, and femme.
- Actually demonstrate attraction to such a person.
- Actually have an on-screen romance/sexual contact with such a person that wasn't a joke.
- Demonstrated appreciation for Angel Dust's everything.
- Just not made transphobic jokes about Angel Dust.
- Made a fourth-wall breaking "hey ladies, gentlemen, the rest of you" comment.
- Made a fourth-wall breaking comment, as above, before removing shirt or doing some beefcake pose.
Like, I'm less mad about what it did (I know there's been discussion of the treatment of molestation and the transphobic jokes, which I don't dispute) than what it didn't do? I feel like this movie was meant to make everyone uncomfortable except that golden demographic of the thirty-something white male.
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