So I checked out Once Upon a Deadpool last night… which is to say, the weird experimental film that turns Deadpool 2 into a PG-13 film. Presumably this is done to appease on some level Disney which has purchased (or is purchasing) Fox, the current owner of the Deadpool (and X-Men) film rights. I imagine the experiment asks if people will see a PG-13 Deadpool… or maybe whether or not offering an R and PG-13 film could work. I dunno.

I honestly went to see this version of the film out of genuine curiosity… on a socio-cinematic-marketing level, I wanted to see if they could pull of turning a hard R rated action movie into a friendly(ish) PG-13. I wasn’t really interested in the film, though I guess I was curious to see if the extra footage filmed for it was funny. This is the only reason an adult should see this movie though… teenagers (who have already seen it, right?) might be able to go now without their parents. Yay?

But, the thing is, this is a very hard PG-13… so it’s not like it’s family-friendly. They have removed a lot of the gore, leaving in a little blood, but there’s still dismemberment and a ton of people getting shot and chainsawed (though you’d see a LOT worse on, say, The Walking Dead on basic cable). They have removed all but the PG-13 allowed number of F bombs but left in a ton of other four (and three) letter words (and included all the middle fingers). They have sometimes swapped out songs with a lot of swearing and only slightly muted another song’s F bombs but left in “holy shit balls”. So I guess that’s ok for little Billy and Tommy? <shrug> The MPAA is a mystery, my friends.

But what they have left behind, after all these cuts and additions, is largely the same movie… which was good. The film is occasionally choppy and rushed since they cut out or heavily edited a number of fight scenes. They did insert some new scenes or alternate takes of some jokes (not all of which were R rated to begin with so that’s weird).

They also inserted a pretty funny frame story where Deadpool has kidnapped adult Fred Savage and imprisoned him in a rebuilt Princess Bride set. They use these sequences to pad the running time back to two hours and also to comment (amusingly) on the movie itself. Like a cut-away where Fred accuses Deadpool of “Fridging” Vnessa or going over the impossibly complicated comic book back story of Cable. It’s all good. Kind of pointless, but funny. Kind of like Deadpool 2, I suppose.

Overall, this isn’t as good a movie due to some slight choppiness and the general knowledge there’s a funnier, more brutal cut out there. But it’s not a bad movie even at PG-13.. it’s an interesting experiment and it doesn’t suffer as bad from being chopped down as some horror movies I’ve seen. At the end of the day, it’s kind of a weird shrug that I hope doesn’t mean Disney is going to demand sanitized versions of DP.

Score: 83