Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

Deadpool

There is no one quite like Deadpool. A foul-mouthed, sexually-ambiguous, dirty-minded mercenary whose wit is surprisingly clever even if it’s immensely childish. The appeal of a character like Deadpool is that he says what’s on his mind without filter and is so incredibly good at what he does that you can’t help but cheer his quest.

Fighting to locate the fiendish doctor who saved his life, but left him physically deformed, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) faces success and setbacks in his attempt to thwart the self-titled Ajax (Ed Skrein). While the Valentine’s Day release of the film might seem like strange counter-programming, the film really is about love, the pure, complex, filthy love between Wilson and Vanessa (Morena Baccarin).

Reynolds was born to play this role and delivers with such strength that you can’t help but wonder where this actor has been all these years. Other than his compelling work in The Nines and Buried, this version of Reynolds has been largely absent. The film suffers in its depiction of women. Many of the characters are pale stereotypes from Gina Carano’s Angel Dust to Brianna Hildebrand’s Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Even Vanessa, although atypical for your typical romantic interest, is a slightly more radical version of the standard damsel in distress character. However, this is a film filled with stereotypes because that’s what it’s designed to do. It pokes fun at the rigidity of superhero films in recent years and even targets those tropes in its comical and fascinating opening titles sequence where no one gets a name above the credit and is reduced instead to juvenile, if appropriate, descriptor such as “a CGI character.”

The film has everything a bored comic fan could want. It roasts the very tropes that have become staid in the hands of Disney’s Marvel Machine and seeks to give those looking for a more adult, less-filtered adventure to have a bit of fun.