Ryan Reynolds Can Go To Hell

I did not love Deadpool & Wolverine.

Over the last week, I have seen three movies in theaters: North by Northwest, Deadpool & Wolverine and A Clockwork Orange. Two of those movies are from 1959 and 1971. The third, the recently-released Deadpool & Wolverine, is a strong argument for why movies should be banned. If this is what we’re doing (and what’s succeeding), we may want to call it a day on the once-illustrious artform.

It isn’t that Deadpool & Wolverine is a bad movie. It’s that it’s not a movie. It’s a thinly-veiled cameo-fest with the semblance of a plot hidden by semi-homophobic jokes, bland fourth-wall character breaks and a barely-working “Now That's What I Call Music! 8” CD.

Sentimentality and violence are a rotten mixture; so are childishness and cynicism.
—Pauline Kael, 1973

Ryan Reynolds was once a legitimately interesting actor. He made amusing rom-coms like The Proposal and Definitely, Maybe, out-there engaging projects like Mississippi Grind and Buried, and he even ridicules his persona in Adventureland, playing a worthy antagonist to a legitimately good movie.

Over the last handful of years, Reynolds has played one character and one character only: Deadpool. Free Guy is Deadpool. Red Notice is Deadpool. And Deadpool is of course Deadpool. This character archetype is a sly anti-hero who’s just happy to be there, winking at the screen all the while. There are crude jokes, a bit of pop-culture savvy and an incessant feeling of him saying “Please, please like me.” It’s exhausting.

Marvel has been in rough shape for a bit now, so this feels like a perfect mash-up of the cameo-laden films that have been coming fast and furious and Reynolds’ middle-school humor in which the word “retard” is thrown around and Deadpool spends half the movie making barely disguised references to his boner.

The movie looks like shit, even though it took $200 million to make, and if you take out the surprise cast, the entire plot is go here, go there, go back. The audience was howling, however, so maybe it’s all a lost cause.

ah yes, ryan reynolds, the empty void upon which an IP can rubber stamp any smug sentiment they want. a visage of such gravitationally overwhelming star power that his most famous role is him in a featureless mask without even so much as a mouth. a beloved cell phone salesman -@boringstein

There’s a specific chicken-or-the-egg scenario here. Are audiences liking these movies because it’s what they’ve been taught to enjoy? Or are audiences demanding these movies so overwhelmingly that Marvel and DC have no choice but to keep pumping them out?

I would hope it’s the former but as evidenced by Twitter’s explosion at the new Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom casting, there’s just a subset of people that sees superheroes as the full breadth of movies and everything else is just “if I see it, I see it.” It’s a bummer, to be honest.

It’s tough to blame Reynolds when he’s so successful. The new Deadpool movie has skyrocketed past $500 million at the global box office. Reynolds now owns a soccer team (in case you haven’t seen the countless ads). And, he’s become one of the few box-office constants in an era where even the biggest stars have to adapt to intellectual property. He’s been leaning further and further into the Deadpool personality that it’s tough to know exactly where Reynolds ends and the Marvel reprobate begins.

Ryan Reynolds is like the Black Eyed Peas (the band) of Hollywood, extremely popular and successful but not liked by any actual human being you've ever met. And just like Will.I.Am (music's Antichrist), he has reshaped whole swaths of popular culture in his self-satisfied, excessively hair-gelled image. -Israel Daramola

Reynolds, a superhero stalwart failing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Blade: Trinity and The Green Lantern, eventually found a caped crusader who shares his juvenile humor and love of vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake. It would be kind of beautiful, a true love-at-first-sight romance, if it didn’t suck so much. There’s nothing worse than someone staring at the screen and saying, “Hey, you see this shit over here? What’s this all about?” It’s lazy and worse than that, it’s not funny.

His other big movie this year, IF, is a saccharine fable (ostensibly) for kids directed by John Krasinski. It made a lot of money and was critically and culturally reviled, which feels about right for Reynolds. The man has no time for a middle ground. Everything’s always over-the-top in a way that feels like it’s built for a social media landscape with zero patience.

What this all reminds me of is a find by @theoceanblooms on how Marvel crops everything for a 1:1/vertical video for TikTok and social media promo. Nothing is made to be interesting or fun, but it’s purely for the cash grab and to make everything as recognizable as possible. Why direct something in a new way when you can just keep the camera still and push everything to an algorithm? We’re like a year away from a new Deadpool movie just being full clips of older movies with Reynolds sitting in a chair (a la Michael Jordan in The Last Dance) making pithy remarks.

Reynolds’ “work” for Deadpool is the acting/producing version of Marvel filming its movies and shows for TikTok. Everything’s a meme or forced to be some type of bland vague promotion for a piece of content a decade from now. Reynolds is the perfect person to combine with Marvel. There’s nothing there other than the potential for more money.

Ryan Reynolds is a reflection of the worst society has to offer. A bland handsome-ish white guy with mediocre, easy jokes who frequently cashes in on whatever’s working. If he wasn’t an actor, he’d be working in middle management on Wall Street somewhere making “my wife” jokes around the water cooler and then firing 1/4 of the company the second something goes awry. He’s evil, Marvel Jesus (derogatory) and now working on a sequel to Red Notice for Netflix. Because of course, he is.