Deadpool Movie Review

For all the hoopla surrounding Deadpool – strong box office receipts; excellent audience reception; and even positive critical consensus – it doesn’t take long to look past the surface to see that there’s not really much there apart from an admittedly entertaining comic book adaptation. Shouldn’t that be enough for a comic book superhero movie? We go for the entertainment, right? But nothing else?

This may be a case of people getting a little too excited just because the movie attempts to break ranks with the clichés of the genre. Instead of pleasant PG-13 action that’s short on bad language and long on mild violence, Deadpool sears up and down, there’s sex, and the violence (though cartoonish) very violent and full of blood. This ground has been trod before. Kick Ass got there first, although I think Deadpool does it better and with great moral clarity.

Serenity Movie Review

Seven years ago I went into the cinema to watch Serenity not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know anything about its writer and director Joss Whedon, who already had a cult following for his “Buffy” TV series and its spinoff “Angel.” I had also never heard of his short-lived series “Firefly,” canceled after a mere 13 episodes, which served as a precursor to the film. All I knew was that I was totally enthralled by the universe presented on screen.

Serenity’s amalgamation of the science fiction and western genres was unlike anything I’d seen to that point and in retrospect it’s almost an obvious combination to make. The premise is that 500 years in the future, the earth has become uninhabitable and the population has been relocated to another system of planets terraformed for habitability. There is an alliance that controls the central planets but at the edges of the system life is governed by a kind of Wild West code of justice.