Deadpool (2016) - Review
Film
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein
Two and a half stars
Deadpool hates its audience – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Nothing is sacred to this film – or character (played with gleeful abandon by Ryan Reynolds) – which pokes fun at superhero-movie culture, Hollywood, Reynolds himself, the film’s director Tim Miller, love and human decency – and that’s only during the opening credits.
On paper, it sounds like a lot of fun, and the film starts out strong with a cheeky self-awareness – but this starts to wear thin very quickly. This notoriously raunchy, irreverent and very R-rated bad-boy property of the Marvel comic book world, part of the X-Men line, seems to have matured to only a fifth-grade level in its humour, wit and ideas about subversion.
This pervasive, toxic juvenileness suffocates even the more clever aspects of the film. It makes the entire experience a trying one, especially for the uninitiated who are not familiar with the character’s unique take on superheroes, and who might be blindly expecting another Avengers or X-Men.
Deadpool is at least refreshing in its willingness to try something new. It is unlike anything we’ve really seen before in the genre. No heroes are born. No worlds are ending. No cities are destroyed. The body count is still preposterously high, but it’s not because some big baddy blows up a skyscraper. It’s because wisecracking mercenary Wade Wilson (Reynolds) agreed to lend his body to some secret scientific experiments in the hopes of curing his cancer. It does – and it gives him super-healing powers, too – but at the cost of his good looks.
Deadpool is essentially a revenge story about a guy who is too vain to return to his beautiful girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) while disfigured. So he hunts down the man responsible, Ajax (Ed Skrein), to fix him.
To be fair, Wade was pretty twisted even before his transformation. He starts out obnoxious and stays obnoxious – the mask just allows him to abandon the pretence of any social graces. For better or worse, Reynolds wears the character well.
The violence is carried out with such smirking glee that it becomes a bit uncomfortable to watch – but maybe it is simply more honest than other superhero pics about what its audience wants, and isn’t concerned with any pretence of heroism to justify the gratuitous stabbings, slashings and shooting. Yet there is a numbing aspect to Deadpool too. It is supposed to shock you with its vulgarity, with its impertinence, with its willingness to roast anyone and anything.
But for a movie in which everything was clearly on the table, and nothing was sacred, it’s difficult to understand how it so often goes for the easiest, crudest joke.
Comedy and sustained energy were the most important things to get right in a movie such as this, and Deadpool misses on both. In the end, it’s hard to shake the feeling that they’ve made a movie for adolescent boys that only adults are allowed to see.
DEADPOOL IS IN CINEMA NOW !
