Review: ‘Deadpool’

“Deadpool” is a total have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of movie. A thoroughly unconventional character making jokes at the expense of the thoroughly conventional film in which he inhabits, “Deadpool” features all the greatest hits, like the origin story, the secret friends, the bland villain, the final battle atop a giant obviously CG-ed structure, unmentioned yet obvious collateral damage, it has it all. This is, after all, a comic book movie.

But it’s that rare breed of comic book movie, which is to say, it’s the R-rated kind, meant for adults though we all know the youngsters will probably eat this up. We’ve had “Watchmen” and the “Kick Ass” movies, and the very underappreciated “Punisher: War Zone,” and that’s it. And now we can add “Deadpool” to that list, which is as violent and foul mouthed as a Marvel-branded movie featuring X-Men characters will probably ever get (until the sequel anyway), and thanks to the very nature of the Deadpool character from the comics, they have something that other comic book movies can’t get away with, which is directly referencing this movie as it plays out as well as other comic book movies, bringing a weird element of meta-comedy that feels refreshing among the deluge of superhero movies we’ve been getting hit with for a few years now (and no end in sight).

You see, created in the early 90s, this Deadpool character became an action parody of comic books, often addressing the reader directly, totally self aware of the fact that he is a fictional character inside of a comic. This trait is brought to the movie, so Deadpool is totally aware he’s in a movie, making quips about things like how the studio’s budget limiting the amount of characters they could have, or referencing other characters within the same “movie universe” by the real names of the actors and not the characters they actually portray, complaining about confusing movie timelines, hell there’s even a moment where everything stops and Deadpool, in voice over form, directly addresses only the girlfriends in the audience and explains that this is not a typical comic book movie, and in this kind of manner it certainly is not. Could you imagine Wolverine or Captain America or Batman looking directly at the camera and making a joke about being in a movie?

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is an ex special forces guy who hires himself out as some sort of super low level legbreaker and right around the same time something good happens to him, and something bad happens to him. The good is that he meets and falls in love with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), a hooker with a heart of gold and the mouth of a sailor, and the bad is that he is diagnosed with late stage terminal cancer. As a last ditch effort to stay alive, he signs up for some shady medical procedure to cure his cancer, which would also happen to give him superhuman abilities. The procedure eventually works and his cancer is cured and he gains super healing powers, but it also deforms him from head to toe. He is also told that he was going to be sold off to the highest bidder to do their dirty work, but he breaks out of the facility and then dedicates the rest of his time to revenge and trying to fix his ugly mug so he can go back to Vanessa.

This makes “Deadpool” both an origin film and a love story, as love is the only reason Wade Wilson made the decisions he made which ended up making him a masked mercenary with his own non-hero based agenda to fill. And a good amount of time in this movie is dedicated to showing how Wade and Vanessa get along and how much they mean to each other, so that the story actually matters when it comes to their love and what Wade would do for her. That’s the having it both ways thing. “Deadpool” is a movie that snarks on itself and rest of the “X-Men” universe in which it belongs, but it also strives for a little bit of meaning and redemption by the end, and it allows itself to be more than just a parody of the movies that have come before it.

Interestingly, this movie also now expands that “X-Men” universe, as it includes an underused character from the “X-Men” movies and introduces a new one, in the forms of giant metal Russian Colossus and sullen angsty teenager Negasonic Teenage Warhead, which is a helluva name. Which means FOX can now go a couple of ways with their shared universe. Having established Deadpool as a person the X-Men are actively recruiting, he can now pop up in the PG-13 rated “X-Men” movies, and characters like Wolverine can be used in the lower budgeted R-rated “Deadpool” movies. Having bungled the Fantastic Four yet again, FOX is going to ride this Deadpool and X-Men wave as far as it will go, and based on this movie’s opening weekend success and the continued success of the X-Men movies, this could be what they were finally hoping for in terms of an Marvel/Disney-like shared movie universe, allowing for more spin offs, more team ups, more movies, and more revenue in general.

But who would have thought it would have been this movie to kick it off for them in a real way? This is a relatively small movie because it had a small budget in terms of movies like this; just consider how “Avengers: Age of Ultron” cost about $250 million to make and “Deadpool” cost about $58 million. A violent R-rated movie about a character most people don’t know and a lot of people might not get is lucky to even get that much money to play with, so this movie was much more of a gamble for FOX than any sort of sure thing. So surely they will up the budget for the sequel but hopefully not by too much because while I am sure Deadpool the character would benefit from having a little more scope, it is also nice to see these kind of movies in which entire cities are not under siege, and the whole world doesn’t have to be saved, instead the plot is motivated by the main character and his needs and wants. The smaller scale is a nice contrast to the overblown spectacle we get now every summer. Even the trailer for “X-Men: Apocalypse,” shown before “Deadpool” because duh, features the image of a city being destroyed by what appears to be overly extreme weather, and it just could not look more boring. How many CG cities can we see destroyed before we stop caring? Because I think we passed that number a long time ago. Thanks to the budget limitations, this movie features a small roster of characters and an intimate story about love and vengeance, and it works.

And having the origin story out of the way, future Deadpool adventures can be a little more inventive and different than the average fare, because while the character in this movie is unique in terms of movie superheroes, the movie itself is surprisingly rote, and really just pointing out that sameness is not enough of an excuse to run with it. As a spoiler-free example, there is an initial mid-credits scene at the end of the movie in which Deadpool comes out all Ferris Bueller style and tells the audience to go home because they weren’t going to the now expected post-movie scene stinger that sets up the next film in the franchise. But at the very of the credits, Deadpool comes back out and, again talking directly to the audience, teases a bit about the next film in the franchise. So they made fun of the concept, but then went ahead and did it anyway. That’s kind of the movie in a nutshell, and really depending on how much a particular viewer wants to get out of a movie like this, this may just be enough to satisfy.

An interesting movie all in all, and a wild reintroduction of a character, “Deadpool” the movie franchise is officially a thing and we’ll be seeing more of Ryan Reynolds as this character for the next few years, so good for him, he finally did it. We can now all collectively choose to forget the Green Lantern ever happened.