Deadpool (2016)

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!