Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
This was so exhausting. It was exhausting trying to figure out why I wasn’t laughing while the rest of the theater was cackling like mad. “Am I the asshole?,” as they say. It was exhausting to try to reconcile the glaring irony that acknowledging the hollowness of the super-hero genre while indulging in every single cliché of the genre isn’t clever or subversive at all, but rather it’s just self-defeating. The success of the Deadpool phenomenon is a symptom of something really, terribly wrong with our culture; it’s a sign that we all think that if we “self own” it somehow negates the fact that corporate culture has supplanted real art. It’s not just capitalism but capitulation—that’s worse! Objectively, demonstrably worse! It’s like we’re all trapped in a horrible shopping mall and someone offers to show us how to escape, but the escape route is really just a soulless shopping spree in that same godforsaken shopping mall. It’s disheartening to the extreme, but I couldn’t figure out whether it was better or worse that Hugh Jackman, bless him, was honestly trying to deliver a real, honest to goodness, thespian performance. He wasn’t just cashing a paycheck (looking askance at Wesley Snipes) or trying to skate by on his flagrantly limited range (Mr. Ryan Reynolds). No, Jackman was taking the whole thing rather seriously and legitimately working his butt off to deliver bona fide pathos. I felt so sorry for him. All he’s got to show for this miserable medicine show is tons and tons of money.
I also asked myself, “Wait a minute. Is this any worse than a Mad Magazine spoof?" I came to the conclusion that yes, it is worse, because you can read a Mad Magazine spoof in about five or ten minutes. This movie actually runs thirty-eight hours and seventeen minutes, if you measure it by the years off of your life that it takes.
Saw it at Regal Union Square with my fourteen-year old daughter who, even though she laughed a lot, leaned over to me halfway through the runtime and said, “This movie sucks!”
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