DEADPOOL: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

I promise that the film is more than DMX’s “X Gon Give It To Ya” for ninety minutes, despite what the trailer might suggest. Ryan Reynold’s passion project about the fast, funny, foul-mouthed uber-violent merc with a mouth that finally makes up for his piss-poor debut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is finally up on the big-screen with the first superhero film of 2016, Deadpool. 

When former Special Forces operative Wade Wilson gets cancer in everything bar his right pinkie, left testie, and third nipple he volunteers for a rogue experiment that gives him super-powers and a super-unf*ckable face. So bestowed with accelerated healing powers and a face like Bea Arthur’s testicles he uses this great power for great irresponsibility as he becomes a gun for hire. You know the rest of the story doesn’t really matter: bad guy steals his girl, he’s got to get her back, lots of craziness and an insane amount of meta references repeatedly punches you in your face for the next hour and forty eight minutes. 

Look, the first thing you need to know is that this isn’t a comic book movie, this is a Deadpool movie, which is basically a comic book movie turned up all the way up to f*cking eleven. It is really violent, like really really violent for a comic book movie, it is filled with profanity, lewd jokes, lots of sexual content and nudity - so it’s not for kids any more than 2010’s Kick-Ass was for kids. But it is entertaining, really entertaining, with rapid-fire non-stop jokes from start to finish and some great action sequences, even though most of them were shown to us in the trailers and TV spots.  

The film is almost a little bit like an episode of Family Guy where it’s just one joke after another after another and if one joke doesn’t land it doesn’t really matter because the next one is only five seconds away. The film is filled with so many nods, winks and digs at comic book movies, easter eggs and other references that you could be forgiven for thinking that the film is suffering from Tourettes Syndrome with all these twitches. But the film really does live and die on Ryan Reynolds charm and comedic timing - he’s just so damn funny and self-deprecating throughout the runtime, taking the piss out of every other comic book movie and his own stabs at comic book films. 

And while we’re at it, how awesome has all the marketing for this film been? They left no stone unturned when promoting this film, from capitalising on holidays to producing material that tricks your girlfriend into seeing Deadpool to advertising the film using only emoticons. Once again, it was Ryan Reynolds comedic charm that has turned Deadpool from a niche character only known by comic nerds, to the character everyone is talking about this year (especially when we Batman, Superman, Captain America and Iron Man all making appearances in the next few months.) 

Of course don’t forget that this film also exists in the Fox-Men shared universe and even though there are lots of continuity issues when compared to the previous seven X-Men films, this can all be forgiven thanks to the continual fourth wall breaking and acknowledging that even Fox don’t know if this is set in the McAvoy era or Stewart era of X-Men movies. 

The film isn’t perfect. The development of the villains is really really thin, I mean beyond paper-thin, more like Christian Bale going for another Oscar weight-loss thin and the climax happens on top of some big structure that they never really explain what it is or why the villains are there in the first place - maybe they did explain it and I just never heard it because I was laughing so much, that could easily have happened during this movie. But these complaints are only little niggles, honestly you’re too busy laughing and having a genuinely good time to care about these kinds of things. 

Overall, this film deserves an audience just for its effort alone, but thankfully there are so many great reasons to see this. Fans of comic book movies are going to have a good laugh, Deadpool fans are going to see this as a near-perfect interpretation of the character and everyone else is going to applauding with the rest of the cinema when the end credits start to roll. 

Deadpool gets Four and a Half Stars (or Four and a Half of Bea Arthur’s testicles - I believe she has eight, and she hangs them around her neck, and they’re all hers and not anyone else’s) 

STEVE JOBS: SPOILER-FREE REVIEW:

How many Steve Jobs movies and documentaries are we going to get? Is it going to become like every other Apple product and we’ll be subjected to upgraded versions of Steve Jobs biopics that always look brighter and shinier than the previous biopics but also make the previous Steve Jobs biopics seem obsolete? Hopefully, they stop, and if they stop here then they’ll have stopped on a high. 

Steve Jobs is the new biopic of the man behind the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and the loss of all your money from your wallet. Set behind the scenes of three of Jobs’ biggest unveilings; the film is split into three equal parts each set in real-time 40 minutes before each big presentation. During these 40 minute time periods, Steve Jobs deals with system malfunctions, board meeting debates, parenting issues, alimony deliberations and most importantly his massive fucking ego. With a solid recurring cast throughout each time period along with some kinetic editing and delivery of the shifts in time and space makes this one of the more interesting biopics of the last two decades. 

It’s a given that this is an improvement to the Ashton Kutcher version. Essentially, if the Kutcher version was a first generation iPod Shuffle then this new version is the iPhone 6 of Steve Jobs biopics. Seeing as they’ve upgraded everything; they’ve upgraded Ashton Kutcher to Michael Fassbender, they’ve upgraded from Matt Whiteley (whose only ever writer credit is that Jobs piece of shit) to the new and improved Oscar-winning writer of The West Wing Aaron Sorkin, we’ve upgraded from the director of Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote to the Oscar winning director of Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, and we’ve upgraded from low-rent Seth Rogen to... Seth Rogen. 

So with all these upgraded elements, how good is it? The dialogue is punchy and tight, the performances are all rock solid and the narrative itself works so well in this three act structure. Essentially you have all of Steve Jobs biggest moments tied together by these three unveilings which are presented in compactly edited flashback, call backs to the previous conversations and character development through simple gestures. So yeah, it’s a pretty good film, if maybe just a little too clean and a little too tightly packaged. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved Sorkin’s writing style, it’s such a unique voice in cinema and television nowadays that you could easily argue that he is an auteur in his own right ahead of the director, however with directors like Fincher and Boyle I realise that’s an incredibly hard argument to make. Getting back to Sorkin’s writing here though, it feels far too clean with respects to what is said in the film. It would be easy to say that this whole film has been written with the benefit of hindsight because everything that Steve Jobs says, even back in 1984, is indicative of how we live our lives today. Now Jobs is presented as arrogant, abrasive, dismissive of others, but throughout the whole film, he’s always right which just seems a little too convenient, plus some lines come off a little too perfect between all the arguments and back and forths.    

Performance-wise everyone is performing at their best with Rogen putting in a very non-Rogen performance, Kate Winslet brings her usual talent but with a very hard to pin-point accent, but of course everyone is talking about Fassbender’s performance. His performance is good, he sounds like Jobs, as he ages he grows into Jobs, but in yet another year of white-washed Oscar nominations, its‘ Fassbender’s performance that feels like it could have made way for Samuel L Jackson in The Hateful Eight, or Michael B Jordan in Creed or especially Jason Mitchell’s role as Eazy-E. 

When all is said and done, Steve Jobs is one of the more creative biopics and certainly worth watching if you are an Apple fan, however if you are not an Apple fan then this film will not win you over.    

Steve Jobs gets Four out of Five Stars (or Four out of Five obsolete Ashton Kutcher iPod Shuffles)