It’s hard not to like a film that praises its writers as ‘the real heroes of this movie’. Ryan Reynolds has finally got this made after years of living in The Green Lantern’s shadow and he is brilliant as the verbose anti-hero. Deadpool gleefully subverts the superhero clichés, is self-referential and full of verbal gags.
The film gets off to a great start; I won’t ruin anything but let’s just say you’ll never listen to ‘Angel Of The Morning’ in the same way again. Told mainly through flashbacks we learn how Wade (Ryan Reynolds) became Deadpool. After meeting his soul mate in Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) he is then diagnosed with terminal cancer and reluctantly accepts help from a stranger to be tested on by the Weapon X program (which created Wolverine). A British doctor, Ajax, brings out the mutant in Wade but only by torturing and leaving him badly scarred. Wade, now blessed with regenerative powers and superior fighting skills, escapes the facility and vows to hunt Ajax down.
Deadpool’s antagonist, Ajax, is cartoonish bad and I think a film that aims to stand out from the superhero crowd could have given us a more memorable villain. However, T.J. Miller excels as the amusing friend of Deadpool, telling him when he takes off his mask: ‘You look like Freddy Krueger face-fucked a topographical map of Utah.’
You get the feeling that Deadpool has come around at exactly the right time.
There are too many superhero movies (and TV shows now thanks to Netflix), so this film has a lot of fun distorting the origin story mould. Reynolds constantly acknowledges the viewers, openly mocking every aspect of the film he inhabits. The juvenile humour does grow tiresome though and the constant breaking of the fourth wall threatens to pull us out of the story but for the most part Deadpool succeeds in giving us a new, albeit warped, perspective of a superhero film.
The last act adheres to the formula of previous Marvel films and, come the credits, you can’t help wishing the filmmakers had been a bit more risky with their choices, because they end up conforming to the superhero clichés that they were so desperate to subvert.
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