Cinemutants - Deadpool (2016)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2016, it’s Deadpool. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) becomes the Merc With a Mouth after a mad experiment unlocks his mutant gene and makes him unkillable – and aware of the fourth wall, which he’s dead-set on breaking. After leaving Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), the love of his life, Deadpool is out for revenge against Ajax (Ed Skrein) – but not if the X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) can stop him.

1. It rhymes with “Pulverine.” Now that we’ve reset the timeline with Days of Future Past, the X-franchise remedies one of its greatest mistakes, giving Ryan Reynolds a second chance at the character that I would argue completely reshaped the trajectory of his career. Sarcastic and garrulous, potty-mouthed yet entirely affable, Reynolds might as well have been born to play Deadpool – this Deadpool, that is. And the film is unapologetically not in continuity with X-Men Origins: Wolverine; though this Wade Wilson is a former soldier of fortune, his mutant power isn’t unlocked until a first-act flashback, and there’s a sense that the X-Men have been aware of him for some time (more on that in a moment). All of this is incompatible with the mute assassin that was (spoilers) decapitated by Wolverine in the late 1970s of the earlier film – though, in one of the film’s better gags, Wade still possesses an action figure of this misguided adaptation. (We’ll revisit the prequel, quite literally, in the next Deadpool film.)
2. McAvoy or Stewart? While I thought this recap series might be a good lead-up to Deadpool & Wolverine, finding the little clues along the way like a deerstalker, what it’s done more is remind me of how murky and nonsensical the timeline(s) could be. (No wonder the TVA is getting involved.) As a serial fourth-wall breaker, Deadpool is perfectly placed to hang a lantern on the franchise’s flexible continuity, and his frequent knowing winks turn the audience into insiders who are ready to laugh along with jokes about Professor X’s performers and the low budget that kept us from getting a full-blown team of X-Men in this film. (“It's funny that I only ever see two of you. It's almost like the studio couldn't afford another X-Man.”) We can assume this movie takes place in the present day of the X-Universe, but whether it’s before the mansion coda to DoFP, in the future of the First Class universe, or just an entirely separate timeline... we might need to wait another month.
3. Language, please! When it was released, Deadpool was the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, dethroning 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded. (It’s since been beaten by Deadpool 2, which was in turn trounced by 2019’s Joker. Oppenheimer currently holds the #2 spot, a joke which one might expect Deadpool to make in the upcoming sequel.) The comic book superhero genre had flirted with R-ratings – Blade and Watchmen spring to mind – but Deadpool proved how bankable a grown-up offering could be. And this film is indeed for grown-ups, replete with ultra-violence, creative profanity, and a smattering of nudity for good measure. (Kind of weird that it’s on Disney+, actually.) It’s hard to imagine watering down Deadpool for Disney’s MCU, but the trailers for Deadpool & Wolverine suggest he’ll flirt aggressively with the line – or rake in enough money to convince Disney that superheroes can swear even if they’re not in a James Gunn film.
4. We will make an X-Man of you yet. One of the most interesting throwaway lines of the film finds Colossus confessing that he has, more than once, invited Deadpool to join the X-Men. As serious as Xavier’s Academy has been presented thus far, it’s impossible to imagine Deadpool in the ranks, but it tells us so much about the cloyingly optimistic Colossus, a much-needed upgrade from his wallpaper-thin characterization in the previous films. Will we see Daniel Cudmore reprise his role, as he did in Days of Future Past? Or is Stefan Kapičić now the only Colossus in the multiverse? And of our budget-mandated two X-Men, Brianna Hildebrand is a terrific anti-Deadpool in Negasonic Teenage Warhead, whose mutant superpowers include “long sullen silences, followed by mean comments.” If she can ride the multiversal wave and join Kamala Khan in the MCU’s ‘first class,’ I will be outrageously happy.
5. Four or five moments. At an hour and forty-eight minutes, Deadpool is littered with rapid-fire jokes, throwaway one-liners, and brutal physical comedy. As many times as I’ve seen the film (and it has been a lot), I always find myself forgetting a handful of jokes until they accost me once again. I’d entirely forgotten, for example, that Stan Lee has a lascivious cameo in a strip club, or that Deadpool leaves his armaments in a taxicab just before the third act superhero showdown (a casualty of a budget shortfall that nevertheless ends up so much better than just your standard shootout). While the box office receipts suggest that audiences want a comics-accurate Deadpool over whatever happened in Origins, the real truth is that Deadpool is just a cosmic amount of fun in a tight, punchy package (hold your puns). 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: is Deadpool the perfect Valentine’s Day film, or just the best X-Men film that doesn’t have Wolverine in it? Up next, Oscar Isaac gets in on the mutant fun with X-Men: Apocalypse, a movie that is certainly one of the X-Men films of all time.

Deadpool 2 (2018)

From its opening salvo on Logan to postcredits potshots at movies I guarantee you’ve probably forgotten, Deadpool 2 wastes not a moment in reminding us that it’s the “bad boy” of the superhero genre, the riotous class clown not afraid to point out the absurdities and shortcomings that our favorite genre often exhibits. And yet Deadpool 2 manages to find a heart amid all its chaos – even if, as Deadpool’s love chides him, it looks like it’s in the wrong place.

Ryan Reynolds returns to the red spandex as Deadpool, hitman for hire, whose domestic bliss with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is interrupted by his own murder sprees and the appearance of a time-traveling badass named Cable (Josh Brolin). Between an ersatz internship as an X-Man (with Stefan Kapičić and Brianna Hildebrand returning as Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, respectively) and forming his own X-Force team, Deadpool starts to learn that “family” isn’t just an F-word.

My immediate reaction to Deadpool 2 is that I like it better than the first, though I contend part of that difference is the absolute glut of trailers for the first film compared to a relative (and to a large degree self-imposed) drought for the second. There are lots of surprises in Deadpool 2, from metatextual references to surprise appearances from the source material. Ray Donovan fans might even be surprised to see Eddie Marsan crop up as one of the film’s antagonists. The real surprise, though, is that Deadpool 2 doesn’t just retread and overplay the successes of the first Deadpool film. Instead, it finds a way to expand the Deadpool world by bringing in a few new characters and ideas without losing sight of that irreverent brand of self-reflexive humor. If the next film is, as we’ve been led to expect, an X-Force outing, fans will be thrilled to see more of newcomers Cable and Domino (Zazie Beetz), who fit into their characters comfortably and with great cinematic flair.

What’s particularly interesting about Deadpool 2 is its pervading air of the unexpected and the postmodern fun Deadpool has with that novelty. In a scene that feels like an extended metaphor, Deadpool careens around the X-Mansion, playing with familiar props and wrecking the scenery, as if to bring life to the notion that he’s the franchise wild child, and Reynolds is delightful as this unrestrained super-id. He’s clearly having a ball with the part, which translates to uproarious laughs from the audience. But one senses also that Reynolds is frankly stunned at how successful the first film was, a sentiment that carries over into moments like the one early on, in which a stunned Deadpool notes that he’s the star of a film that’s literally spoken about in the same sentence as Jesus Christ (Deadpool famously jousted with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ for R-rated box office records). It’s a great gag but also a bemused “how’d this happen” moment that no one could have predicted.

Speaking of unpredictable, I was astonished to see the sheer number of characters packed into the film, particularly the ones of whom I’ve never even heard. I’m pretty deep into this stuff, but there are quite a few figures from the X-Universe unfamiliar to anyone who’s not a diehard X-Fan of the 1980s and early ’90s. (For good measure, Deadpool tosses in a joke about the art style of the last generation’s X-comics.) The film cleverly manages not to overpack itself, recognizing which characters to develop and which to throw away on a well-timed gag. And boy, are those gags expertly deployed, introduced in an offhanded way that doesn’t foreshadow their reoccurrence but which do manage to get funnier each time they’re echoed. On top of the jokes that are developed over the course of this movie, there are a staggering number of jokes built on moments from the first film – par for the course for a densely referential character like Deadpool, yes, but a true testament to the way that the filmmakers trust the audience to keep up. One could imagine a lazier version of this film that telegraphs each callback by having Deadpool remark on it, but instead Deadpool 2 plops them in, assuming you’ll remember the gags but recontextualizing them well enough for those who don’t pore over these movies like sacred religious texts. (Which, y’know, I do.)

There’s really only one joke in the film that runs on too long, but it’s near the end (no spoilers) and the joke ends up becoming about how long the joke is going on. It’s a gag that wallops another superhero movie in the best National Lampoon tradition of parody, and it’s one of the only times in recent memory that I can recall being successfully pummeled into submission by a single punchline. I recognized immediately that it was also simultaneously a callback to one of the first jokes in the film, and so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see the film go there, but what did end up surprising me was the fact that the film manages to land a truly heartfelt emotional beat on the heels of a tired-til-it’s-funny gag-o-rama. In a film that’s never afraid to deploy lazy writing and then hang a lantern on it, in a film that never fails to pratfall over a punchline, it was a real thrill to see Deadpool 2 stick the emotional landing in a way that manages to humanize a character who’s all too easy to reduce to a manic pixie one-liner. Deadpool 2 is one of that rare breed of sequels that manages to surprise – and perhaps even outdo its predecessor – by keeping sight of the old yet accessing something new about a character with a striking number of narrative layers.

Deadpool 2 is rated for “strong violence and language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug material.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds. Based on the Marvel Comics by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, and Brianna Hildebrand.

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!