After a torturous route to the big screen – including an
ill-advised turn in
X-Men Origins: Wolverine and a mixed-bag detour through
Green Lantern –
Deadpool
is finally here. As if you could have missed it: the marketing has been spot-on
but indecently profuse. Now that it’s arrived, billing itself as a kind of
anti-Valentine’s Day movie, we can see that
Deadpool
is exactly what it promised – a no-holds-barred antihero satire of Hollywood’s
biggest genre – even if the end result is maybe not as much as we might have
liked.
In the part he was born to play, Ryan Reynolds stars as Wade
Wilson, a verbose assassin whose terminal cancer diagnosis leads him away from
the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and into an experimental
treatment aimed at triggering his latent mutant genes. When the experiments
horribly disfigure Wilson, he adopts the identity of Deadpool and goes after
Ajax (Ed Skrein), the sadistic doctor who destroyed his life, much to the
protests of X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead
(Brianna Hildebrand).
I can say as a devout comic book reader that Deadpool’s a
tricky character. Some of his more misguided portrayals have either made him far
too serious or unnecessarily zany, so it’s a very precarious balancing act. On
this count,
Deadpool is a real
success: the characterization is pitch-perfect, and Reynolds is as at home in
the red spandex as he’s ever been, dropping one-liners and breaking the fourth
wall amid acts of quite astonishing violence.
There’s a lot to like here, particularly the portrayal of
Colossus as an avuncular, overgrown big-brother type with a shockingly naïve
understanding of what it means to be a superhero, coupled with a tendency to
deliver bloviating soliloquies on said heroism. With his caricatured Russian
accent, Colossus is the perfect straight man opposite the id-driven Deadpool,
and his paternalistic chemistry with Negasonic Teenage Warhead serves as an
absurdist reminder that this film exists within the X-Men film universe. Fans
are clamoring to see the time traveler Cable show up in future
Deadpool films, but let’s not lose sight
of what a delightful riot this Colossus could provide.
At the end of the day, I enjoyed
Deadpool about as much as one might expect; I left the theater with
a smile on my face, having laughed more or less all the way through. It’s
important not to lose sight of that amid my more critical notes, the first of
which is that the marketing was really quite oversaturated in the sense that a
lot of the good material had been spoiled by trailers and commercial spots.
(Indeed, one joke from the trailers actually works better there than in the
take they used in the film.) Maybe that’s just a casualty of
Deadpool trailers appearing in front of
nearly every movie I’ve seen in the last year, but the film didn’t quite live
up to those original laughs and feelings of anticipation.
My other thought on
Deadpool
is that, for all the subversive fourth-wall breaking for which the character’s
become known, the film actually does comparatively little of that. Much of the
postmodern narration is conventionally accepted in contemporary film, so a
self-aware narrator doesn’t pack as much of a punch as it does in the comics.
Moreover, just quantitatively, the film doesn’t pull out as much meta-humor as one
might expect (again, much of it is in the trailers); in fact, it proceeds
roughly along the same plot threads as
X-Men
Origins: Wolverine – man experimented on, gains abilities, loses girl,
seeks revenge, falls in with X-Men – in other words, a fairly standard
superheroic plot for a character who is capable of so much else.
Put another way,
Deadpool
is a very solid, if conventional, superhero film seasoned lightly with the
Deadpool metafiction and perhaps oversaturated with inappropriate content. Some
of the funniest jokes in the film are about the shockingly low budget, a
reminder that
Deadpool is as much a
proof-of-concept film as anything else, a test to see if moviegoers are ready
for something like the ideal
Deadpool
film I’ve been describing. If box office receipts are any indication – breaking
records in the neighborhood of $135 million – I’d say that
Deadpool 2 is a foregone conclusion. Look, if nothing else,
Negasonic Teenage Warhead is in a multimillion dollar blockbuster film. If
that’s not proof the geeks have won, then consider
Deadpool a failure. Good thing neither of those statements is true.
Deadpool is rated
R for “strong violence and language throughout, sexual content and graphic
nudity.” The violence is really nonstop, quite bloody to the point of being
cartoonish (both in terms of what’s shown and the attitude toward it). A number
of crude innuendoes and expletives pervade the film, and there are several
moments of male and female nudity. Best leave the kiddos at home for this one.
Heads up, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours
Marvel this Wednesday with another installment in
“The Grand Marvel Rewatch,”
so check back then for 2008’s
The
Incredible Hulk. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in
your inbox. Nuff said!
Ex Machina (2015)
– While everyone was excited about Mad Max: Fury Road as a genre film that got nominated for Best Picture, it’s a
shame that the smarter film (which, rightly so, was nominated for Original
Screenplay and Visual Effects) wasn’t at least beside Mad Max on the top. As part of the post-Inception wave of original moody science fiction, Ex Machina asks probing questions about
the place of artificial intelligence, the limits of scientific ethics, and the
vulnerability of human life in the face of its greatest creations. Oscar Isaac
stars as Nathan, a reclusive tech genius who invites his employee Caleb
(Domhnall Gleeson) to his cabin to run a Turing test on his latest invention, a
sentient robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb’s trip, though, takes a turn
when Ava insinuates that Nathan is not telling the whole truth. Now I’ll admit
I’m a sucker for this sort of thing, a smart piece of science fiction with an
intricate screenplay, but there’s no denying that Ex Machina is gripping in the insular way you might expect from a
stage play or brisk novella. Rather than go for broke with spectacle,
first-time director Alex Garland (who adds this to a number of his other
screenplays in the sf genre) keeps the tension internal, raising horrifying
possibilities in ways that even viewers who might have anticipated them come to
dread. It’s tightly acted between the three central cast members and a
supporting fourth, Sonoya Mizuno as Nathan’s silent assistant Kyoko, and
compelling in a way that something so much more spectacular might fail to be. Ex Machina is well performed, hauntingly
horrifying, and definitely not one to be missed for any self-respecting science
fiction aficionado.
