Mass-market ticket-buyers have never been and never will be all that hip. If, however, you can deliver a film — particularly a self-regarding, fourth-wall-breaking, supermetahero thing — that flatters them by making them feel hipper and sharper than they actually are, you’re more than halfway home.

This, to go by reviews and Twitter, is apparently what’s happened with Tim Miller and Ryan Reynolds‘ Deadpool. God help me but since I missed the Los Angeles all-media screening and couldn’t fit in a Santa Barbara viewing last weekend (partly because I didn’t give a shit and partly out of concerns that some shows might be sold out given the huge response — $135 million domestic, $260 million worldwide) I feel I have to submit today. Because it’s made so much money, I mean.

I feel like a nine-year-old kid with cavities who has to go to the dentist. I loved the Captain America films and I worshipped Peyton Reed‘s Ant-Man, but I know I’m going to hate this. Insult to injury, I have to pay to see it. My soul is wilting.

“Deadpool doesn’t have a great deal to offer plot-wise: The arc is predictable, the villains forgettable, and the Big Finale relatively small. It’s true that the movie is more extreme in its violence than is customary—Deadpool favors swords and pistols over his fists—but where it truly breaks new ground is in its tone. Flamboyantly vulgar and determinedly self-referential, Deadpool has the shape of a superhero movie but the soul of a Danny McBride flick.

“Does it all add up to much? No. Is the movie as clever or subversive as it imagines itself to be? No. But for those in the mood for its super-powered low-brow, Deadpool offers an eminently amusing diversion and an object lesson in the elasticity of the genre. Or to put it another way: It’s a hell of a lot funnier thanGreen Lantern.” — except from review by The Atlantic‘s Christopher Orr.