I’m not
very familiar with Deadpool (my first exposure was actually the test footage
for this movie,) but I was aware of the excitement surrounding the character
and the idea of a movie for him, as well as what was evidently the
near-criminal waste of him/Ryan Reynolds in the Wolverine: Origins
movie. I also knew going in to expect a
funny, high-octane show-the-blood-style comic-book movie a la Mark Millar. Safe to say the film delivers on that every
level.
Wade
Wilson, a foul-mouthed mercenary with a don’t-make-a-thing-of-it preference for
helping the little guy, has his life thrown off-kilter by a terminal cancer
diagnosis. When a shady guy in a suit
promises to both cure his cancer and make him a superhero, Wade is skeptical
but decides to try to keep his girlfriend Vanessa from having to watch him
waste away. He sneaks off in the middle
of the night to the super-secret experimental lab, but the results aren’t what
he bargained for. He’s left functionally
immortal, with an automatically-regenerating body, but the mutation has also
made him grotesque, and he doesn’t think he can go home to Vanessa until he
finds the scientist/sadist who did this to him and forces him to fix it.
Ryan
Reynolds is absolutely perfect to play a vulgar, smartass, superpowered former
mercenary on a revenge kick. He’s funny
and profane without (for me) veering too far into d-bag territory, and even
with a mask completely covering his face for most of the movie, his screen
presence is still charismatic (granted, I don’t know how often Deadpool is
CGI’d, but that would still mean Reynolds is making the character come through
on voiceover alone, so kudos to him either way.) In order for wildly graphic, completely
unapologetic violence to work for me, it really depends on the character, and
Deadpool’s casually-cheerful brand of slaughter just seems to fit.
The
plot is fairly formulaic, though it mixes things up by extenstive use of a
nonlinear structure. But what it lacks
in storytelling creativity, it makes up in snarky one-liners. There’s mid-fight banter, cheeky sex jokes,
pop culture references, and colorful analogies, not to mention huge amounts of
fourth-wall breaking (sometimes explicit, with Deadpool directly addressing the
camera, other times just throwaway lines – my favorites include a reference to
sewing Deadpool’s mouth shut and a Stewart-or-McAvoy Professor X distinction.) One place, though, where the movie falls down
for me is with Deadpool’s much-vaunted pansexuality. It’s arguably represented, but there aren’t
any non-heteronormative references that couldn’t be explained away as jokes if desired. Since Deadpool does spend most of the film
preoccupied with his monogamous girlfriend, it’s understandable that we mostly
get that side of things, but a single line mentioning an ex-boyfriend or zhefriend
wouldn’t have broken the bank.
Other
than Reynolds, the only actor I’m familiar with is Morena Baccarin (Inara from Firefly) as Vanessa. She does what she can with a pretty thin
girlfriend characterization. I also
enjoy Brianna Hildebrande as an X-Men trainee, the (as Deadpool notes)
awesomely-named Negasonic Teenage Warhead.
I mean, how do you get cooler than that?
I wish we’d gotten to see more of her in action, but little we do get of
her powers is pretty hardcore.
Warnings
love this
ReplyDelete