Deadpool

Deadpool, with its healing factor lead and adult-ish certificate, reads like a golden opportunity for one lucky special effects make-up house to go absolutely crazy. Picture it: teams of people spending their way through Rupert Murdoch's fortune with the express purpose of manufacturing dozens of lifecast Ryan Reynoldses in various states of shredded disrepair. Sadly, despite having created The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's savage opener (incidentally the best James Bond credit sequence since Maurice Binder passed away), director Tim Miller's ambitions lie elsewhere.

Oily, fucking machinery be damned, there are dick jokes to crack! Body horror, like everything else in Deadpool, isn't an idea to be plucked apart and reexamined on a blockbuster stage, it's an easily digestible punchline. A jabbing, weightless signpost to be recognised on the way to yet another Seth MacFarlane style gag. Deadpool is nothing but a series of listless, desperate sketches. The film pitches itself as Alfie for the superhero cycle but we're never given access to anything that has the potential to be emotionally consistent, never mind devastating. There's no sense of contradiction in Wade's incessant fourth-wall shattering either so, unfortunately, rather than something poppy and exciting, we end up with an X-Men spin-off that plays like an unending Hannibal-King-in-Blade: Trinity supercut.