I went to the first matinee of Deadpool, took one look at the mob in the lobby, and got back in my car and went home; I went back to the last show at night, and by the time the movie started, it looked as if every seat in the house was filled. I was later told that it had been selling out all weekend. And though it is a comic-book movie and I hate comic-book movies, I was never bored. So Deadpool is clearly well-made for its own audience. But I'm not that audience.
It has almost no central plot, and what there is is largely back story which is told rather than shown, with a merciful lack of flashbacks. And the sound track is muddy--a man in the lobby who was a comic-book-movie fan agreed with me on this, though he had good enough ears to understand it--and a great deal of it got away from me. Which might have been a loss, because reviewers report that there is a lot of lowbrow wit in the dialogue. There is also a lot of parody of other comic-book and superhero movies that my lack of experience surely kept me from catching.
But none of that mattered much, because Deadpool is a lot like Mad Max: Fury Road: a wild and ceaseless string of action and special effects sequences, extremely well done, but in such structureless sequence that there is no sense that we are going anywhere, which may be part of the parody, though I doubt it, because it is almost impossible to parody utter nonsense--in fact, it is all but impossible to parody comic-book movies at all.
Depth of performance is suggested by the opening credits, which don't even list the actor's names, just labeling the stereotypes like "Hot Girl" and "British Villain," and the cast is fully up to concepts like that.
So was the audience. Even I was. Though I blush to admit it.
