It seems like it has been years in the making, ever since Fox ruined him in ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine‘, but finally Deadpool is here baby! And man does he make an impact. Everything works so well and it feels like a real fresh take on a superhero movie. You’ve got to love him.
Wade Wilson is a mercenary of sorts. He’s not a great guy as such, but he helps out people with problems. He gets a great girlfriend, but then he also gets cancer. With no real hope of survival, he signs up to a pretty shady program that promises to cure him but in fact tortures him until his mutant powers will activate. They do, and he finds himself invincible, although he is horribly scarred. He makes a suit, chooses a name and soon he’s out for revenge against the people that messed up his face! Whilst ‘Deadpool‘ isn’t the most original story in terms of origins, it does change up the storytelling style a bit by starting in the present then jumping back to his origin once to twice just to keep things interesting.
Ryan Reynolds is cast perfectly as the ‘merc with a mouth’. He’s fast, he’s witty and he’s very funny. The costume is perfect, the characterisation is near-perfect and it’s just hard to imagine anyone else ever being able to play him so well. This is Reynolds’s baby and you can tell he really loves every second of it. And not only that, this is a superhero movie where the love story actually feels real and earned. Wade a Vanessa’s relationship feels organic and you get the real sense they actually love each other. Morena Baccarin is great and she holds her own in scenes with Reynolds really well. T.J. Miller as Weasel, Wade’s best pal has some of the best lines. He’s really funny and works so well in this film. Ed Skrein and Gina Carano aren’t exactly the greatest villains of all time, but they service the plot well enough that it doesn’t matter all that much. The rest of the cast is also pretty good, with Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Stefan Kapičić as the best version of Colossus we’ve seen to date in the X-Men universe!
But the thing that does make this a different kind of superhero movie is the comedy. And more specifically, the adult orientated comedy. From the hilarious opening titles to the pretty amusing post credits scene, there’s a reason this movie has an R rating and it’s not just the swearing or the violence or the blood. It’s the outrageous comedy. Not every single joke works completely, but a lot of them do. And you can tell that so much of the laughs are improvised and that just makes them work even better. Deadpool is a character who knows he is in a comic book. And that’s pretty funny to an extent, and knowing he is in a movie, especially one is such a muddled up, convoluted universe, also works pretty well. It makes for lots of jokes about which Professor X is about currently and about having to wait so long to get his own movie. There are so many funny moments throughout this film that at times it really feels like more of a comedy than a superhero action flick.
But there is action too. Granted, not too much as this film was made on a reasonably limited budget compared to some other superhero films. A set piece on the highway takes up the majority of the film, providing some action beats and then flashing back to the origin story, but there’s also a pretty big climax sequence that would make you kind of surprised at how good they managed to make the effects look on their budget. That’s probably down to first time director and special effects guy Tim Miller, who does a great job at shooting the action, making it look good and most of all making it fun. For a first film as director he’s done a pretty great job!
But so has everyone working on this film. From the amazing advertising campaign leading up to the release to the film itself. It all works really well. It’s no surprise that studios are looking to make more R rated superhero movies now after this one turned out so well. A really fun action comedy superhero movie.
JACK’S SCORE: 4/5
Jack-Types-Stuff 