In everything from the movie’s opening titles to post-credits scene, you’ll soon come to learn that this isn’t just your standard superhero movie.
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Ditto when you cast 72-year-old Leslie Uggams, an embodiment of elegance through years onstage and in nightclubs, as Blind Al, a grumbling, foul-mouthed housemate with a huge drug habit. Deadpool is a love letter to anyone who has read the comic series, making for some great one-liners, quips and action scenes that despite a somewhat haphazard tone, results in a more than worthy origin movie for the merc with a mouth. He leaves Blind Al alone with this parting shot: “There’s 116 kilos of cocaine buried somewhere in the apartment, right next to the cure for blindness”. He doesn’t internalize his angst but instead talks it out, endlessly, frequently addressing the audience directly.
Reynolds doesn’t just break the fourth wall; he smashes it, reaches out into the cinema, grabs you by the collar and then makes a joke about said fourth wall before shooting some bad guy in the head. Then he saws off his own arm.
“Deadpool will always interact with the X-Men universe but you just have to do it carefully”. “I did the things you have to do to be this person”. “It’s like the studio couldn’t afford more extras”.
Baccarin can’t, though it’s not her fault – her character is a Disney version of a sex worker who falls in love with the one trick we see her turn and who makes all the right pop culture references.
The story’s actually a grim one.
Sure, he’s had a few high-profile romances, career highs and lows, and is now married with a baby, but Ryan Reynolds hasn’t changed all that much since 2002’s Van Wilder.
Wade eventually does mutate into a character he calls Deadpool, gaining super strength and invincibility but losing his boyish good looks in the process. Ed Skrein shines as the films main villain, Ajax, with Gina Carano playing his sidekick, Angel Dust, in a cool but limited role.
The violence, all of it used for comic effect, can be extreme. “Deadpool is never going to be the guy that’s saving the world”, he said. Sneering superheroes are a new breed, but Reynolds’ inherent charm and first-time director Tim Miller’s light touch keep the ultra-gory film from veering into gratuitously snarky territory. In Deadpool, Colossus, a hulking CGI mass more intimidating and yet more loveable than his previous onscreen iterations, plays a fish-out-of-water with considerable aplomb, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead is destined to be the new poster child of ironically sullen teens worldwide.
Even a filmmaker with a smart sense of pacing can make this set-up work for only so long, and Miller stops at 108 minutes.
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On the promotion trail for Deadpool, Ryan has also hinted at what superhero team-up movies he wants to get involved with. It’s impossible to envision a sequel with pleasure – this kind of lightning wouldn’t strike twice – but the first one could hardly be improved.
