The movie is rated R for a reason, folks
By Rebecca Peterson, Staff Writer
Here’s a fun new drinking game for you all.
Go to your local theatre, make yourself comfortable, and take a shot for every parent-and-child pair you just know is about to buy a ticket for Deadpool. Two shots if the poor kid selling the ticket tries to warn them and the parents wave him off. Finish your drink if you see them storming out of the theatre half an hour later like they had no idea what they were walking into, like there was no way they could have known.
There is, though. There totally is a way to know what you’re about to watch. Movies, very luckily, are rated on a system based on appropriate subject matter for age groups. A hint: “R” stands for “Restricted.”
Parents, don’t take your kids to see Deadpool.
I know, it’s a free country and you know what’s best for your child—but clearly you don’t if you’re taking them to Deadpool. Just because it’s a Marvel superhero movie doesn’t mean it’s Disney material. I do not care how big your 10-year-old’s eyes are or how much they beg and insist that the other kids in their class have seen it. The parents of those other kids are either desperately vying for the “Cool Parent Award” no matter the cost, or are now scarred for their lives because they just took their child to see Deadpool.
Don’t make that mistake. Be mean. Say no. Most likely, your kid already knows how to torrent movies and can find a bad rip online, and you never have to know about it. Ignorance, in this case, is not only bliss; it will also save your sanity.
I’m thinking of the children, obviously, but I’m also thinking about me: the adult who just walked into an R-rated movie, ready to watch the naughty anti-hero of my dreams get pegged by his girlfriend during a goofy sex montage, only to see that there is a goddamn baby in the theatre. Really? Really, Suburban Parent #3? Now I have to sit there, in my seat, knowing that some of the first images that child is going to have on this good green Earth will involve torture, dismemberment, and someone fracturing their leg on a metal crotch.
I’m scared of sentient children in the audience, because oh boy do they ever have questions. And we, the rest of us, the ones who have lived long enough to be exposed to the diverse and fascinating mating habits of our species either through hearsay or our own misadventures, have to listen to your child ask why the joke “now it’s down to fists” or “sounds like your last Saturday night” is funny.
We don’t want to hear that. No one wants to hear that, especially, not in your child’s helium-esque voice.
And if none of this is convincing you, think of this:
We all get to watch you drag your kid out of the theatre when you can’t take it anymore; the exodus of poor decision making after we’ve hit F-bomb 36 out of 84 (according to IMDB, the Naughty Word count racks up to “about 84 F-words and its derivatives, 3 obscene hand gestures, 21 sexual references, 34 scatological terms, 19 anatomical terms, 8 mild obscenities, name-calling, exclamations, 2 religious profanities, and 9 religious exclamations.”)
You, as a parent, have been given a gift: the chance to shape the future of our world by nurturing the next generation. Deadpool is a great movie that is entirely not for that generation. Not yet, at any rate. In the meantime, Captain America: Civil War is only a few short months away (and that one is a Disney movie!).
For the love of God, I won’t even see Deadpool with my parents. I don’t want to have to explain the fisting joke to them either.
