No film has ever actually managed to get me on its side faster than Deadpool has. Trailers, pictures and footage all had me convinced that Deadpool was going to most likely be an interminable experience.
Then came the opening credits. We learned that Deadpool was “A movie by Some Assholes” starring “God’s Perfect Idiot” and “A gratuitous cameo.” At which point the film could have been a shot for shot remake of previous Ryan Reynolds flop Green Lantern, and I probably would have still given it a passing grade.
So, let’s thank the maker that Deadpool is a damn sight better than that.
Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a mercenary who seems to have finally found his place in life with his loving fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) when he’s diagnosed with an aggressive and advanced form of cancer. In an attempt to cure it, he’s recruited for a program that promises to cure his cancer and grant him superhuman abilities by unlocking latent mutant genes.
The program, led by a mutant named Ajax (Ed Skrein), a man as cruel as he is British, is not as it seems, as the goal is to torture the participants until their genes unlock so he can sell the newly created super soldiers to the highest bidder. The process scars Wade over his entire body, but unlocks mutant abilities to heal anything and everything, as well as to break the fourth wall of reality. Wade manages to escape and, as the mutant anti-hero Deadpool, goes on a rampage to hunt down the man who ruined his life.
Now, that description likely sounds a great deal more dour than the actual film ends up being. Deadpool pitches to your inner 15 year-old boy, for the better and for the worse. It’s a film more than willing to engage in all manner of immaturity, where every clever character-based or meta-joke is accompanied by some variation of a dick joke.
But I’m not necessarily complaining. First, because that style of humor really does show an understanding of the character, which ends up being Deadpool’s greatest asset.
The collection of Marvel-licensed films by 20th Century Fox, of which Deadpool can count itself a member, have always struggled with understanding the core appeals that these characters have in the comics. Largely, because they emerged in the early-2000s with X-Men at a time when the superhero genre did not have the cultural dominance or cache that it holds today. As such, there were a great deal of apologetics that emerged in these films, shoving down the more comic-book elements (most notably the colorful spandex costumes) that served to attempt to ingratiate audiences but now seems dated in a world in which one of our major Hollywood franchises features a man named Captain America in full red, white and blue.
But Deadpool, perhaps owing to its low-budget freedom, earnestly understands what people love about Deadpool and gives it to them. It gives us a joke-a-minute structure with plenty of fourth-wall break turns to the camera. It gives us immaturity mixed within the pathos. Deadpool understands that to earn new fans, you simply have to understand what drew the original fans to the character.
But second, the immaturity works because on the whole, the film’s jokes hit their mark. Reynolds and T.J. Miller (who plays Weasel) are gifted comic actors saddled with most of the humor in this film, along with a very game Baccarin. There’s a great deal to laugh at, from the opening credits sequence to a hilariously clever twist on a romance montage (featuring a joke about International Women’s Day that still makes me giggle) to the film’s committed awareness of its current place within the superhero genre to Reynolds’ sheer commitment and willingness to wring laughs out of the audience with every line.
Do they all work? Hell no. Again, it’s a film that saddles cleverness alongside immaturity and confuses the fact that it can with the fact that it should. Some jokes simply don’t hit, some seem pointless and some border on being driven into the ground with how often they return to the well to do it again (I’m thinking specifically here of jokes about mutant Colossus and his metal genitals). While the film earns enough goodwill to sail through these rough patches, they tend to remind me of what I feared this film would be more than what it ended up being.
Speaking of largely assuaged fears, Deadpool is the film that finally earns Reynolds leading man status. While his commitment to the role has never been in question, spending almost a decade trying to take it off the ground and suffering through an ill-fated attempt at the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds’ talents have often been best left in supporting roles, seemingly fated to forever be a supporting actor in the body of a leading man. Here, however, Reynolds shows a deep range and on-screen presence, carrying the film even through those aforementioned rough patch moments.
And he does so not only through the comic and action moments, which are impressive for him in equal measures, but through the dramatic material, the love story between Wade and Vanessa and the fear of returning to her as a scarred monster, which the film often seems unsure how to address. The film nests it within flashbacks, exchanging the romance with the more immediate comedic and action-oriented material of the present-day of the story. But this leaves the film feeling oddly structured, which is a problem that makes the film oddly rushed. There was legitimate surprise when I realized we were at the ending.
But overall, Deadpool is a question of how on-board you’re willing to get with its character and what you’re doing with him. If, like me, the film wins you over with its weird, teenage-boy charm, then you’re far more likely to be able to get past its flaws than someone who finds the whole exercise rather like listening to nerds riffing in the middle school cafeteria.
It’s a film that feels like it’s for fans, both the ones coming into it as such and the ones the film makes in its opening act.
Grade: B+
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