Deadpool (2016, R)

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

Strong violence, language, sexual content, drinking/smoking, and drug references.