Deadpool 2
I quite enjoyed this film. Had some good laughs, had some decent drama, memorable characters, and overall good fun. Been a week since I saw this already, though, so please excuse how short this review is. Gets a 3/3 from me.
Solo: More Star Wars
This one is more recent in my memory, so I can go a little more in-depth. And my overall impression is... "eh?".
It might just be my shallowness, but as far as patching holes that didn't need patching goes, Rogue One did a much better job, if only for the enjoyable action scenes. I wasn't particularly interested in finding out how the Death Star plans were stolen, but they made a very enjoyable film out of it nonetheless. Likewise, I wasn't particularly interested in Han Solo's back story, but... yeah, still am not.
The movie looks nice, I'll give it that. Actor performance was... uhh, to be honest I'm not the kind of guy who notices that unless it's particularly jarring, and even then only half the time or so. I think they all did a nice job. Whoever-it-was made a good Han Solo, Glover did well as Lando Calrissian, and space-Daenerys wasn't too off-putting either. The Chewbacca suit is as impeccable as ever, you still can't see the zipper.
But again, the subject matter. This still is a story that didn't have to be told. The characters introduced are either meaningless in the big picture (the main Star Wars films) or the conclusion to their story is foregone already. A character that appears in other films has to act consistently, original characters will have to die off or fade into irrelevance before the transition point into the older films. That means the film has to rely on the characters doing cool or memorable stuff. And here, they just... don't.
The action looks nice, but it was unneeded. The Kessel Run served better as a vague backstory than as an action scene, all mystery is removed. Han and Chewbacca are friends, all right, but how they became friends isn't that important. And one doesn't need to see where the Millennium Falcon came from, how Han met Lando Calrissian, or where Chewbacca learned to play space chess.
Then there's the setting and tone of the movie. Throughout the beginning, I didn't get much of a Star Wars feeling. You had a generic, plucky teenager stealing a generic, futuristic space-car on a generic, futuristic futuristic space-port, driving around for a few minutes on streets filled with generic aliens, and only later was there any sort of Star Wars imagery or themes. It looked a little like a generic sci-fi film with a Star Wars re-skin, while Rogue One jumped straight into the spaceships and stormtroopers aesthetics within the first few minutes. This feeling persisted a little throughout the film, although it gradually vanished as more elements were introduced. One'd be hard-pressed to say "this doesn't look like Star Wars" of a scene taking place inside the Millennium Falcon.
Overall, I enjoyed the movie, but it didn't really amaze me. It's not a bad movie at all, but personally it didn't move me as much as the other Star Wars films. Gonna give this one a 2/3.