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Canberra Today 25°/27° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Deadpool 2’ (MA) ***

NO, my critical faculties have not led me astray in awarding three stars for a blockbuster from Marvel Pictures!

Welcome to surrealism at the movies! Call back memories of directors who have created great films in its fertile fields – Bunuel, Jodorowsky, Borowczyk, Lynch, Fellini, Cronenberg, Bergman, Greenaway, Cocteau, Gilliam, Kubrick, Skolimowski, Godard, Kurosawa, Russell, Pasolini.

And now David Leitch, stuntman with 89 credits to his CV since 1995, directing his second feature.

This guy knows how to make the impossible seem everyday, violence to be simultaneously convincing and survivable.

The screenplay by Rhett Reese (also executive producer) along with Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds who also plays central character Wade Williams (a.k.a. Deadpool – I neither know nor care how that came about) isn’t merely in touch with global issues, the politics of the mainstream movie industry and life’s little lunacies. It’s wildly comical, verging on hilarious.

All that comes packed in a grab-bag of ideas as manifested in fantasy blockbuster movies that take themselves seriously when telling stories set in other worlds or in times yet to be experienced. The Marvel label has grown fat on them. The “Deadpool” line takes the next step and embroiders it with a polished sense of the ridiculous. It works. I smiled often at its inanities. The man in the row behind me went further, with constant giggles pervading his experience of the film.

What’s it about? Good guys confronting bad guys, what else? And coming close to disaster until the last reel. The language is unprintable. The references to intimate body parts and some of the instruments used to provide sensory satisfactions are unabashed. The visual effects are spectacular – well, these days that’s the norm.

Reported budget was $US110 million and it shows. It’s released here simultaneously with the US.

At all cinemas

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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