Another Deadpool Review

            As the marketing promised, there is some enjoyable humor in the film, but it seems to fall short of what I as a fan of the comic book character desired to see in the character’s big screen debut. The same can be said for the plot and the tone as well. I’m definitely not denying that the filmmakers had anything but endearing love for the material and the character. I am suggesting that said love was corrupted in the writing process. One thing I admittedly was a little concerned about beforehand was the origin story element. Albeit, Deadpool does have a nice origin story, but I would much rather read a Deadpool adventure comic than an origin story. Especially the one presented in the film, which follows Wade Wilson as a mercenary who out of some sense of heroism that came from nowhere (certainly not the comics) only takes care of intimidators and stockers of young women and other damsels in distress. In the assignment depicted in the film, he tells the young lady what he did, but gets upset when she calls him her hero. The film seems to get pleasure from having its main hero deny that he is one time and time again. He’s pretty insecure about it.

            One thing he’s not insecure about is sex. The relationship in this film is perhaps the shallowest depiction of romance in a superhero film. Over the course of a tongue-in-cheek discussion between pre-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds and a prostitute about their childhoods of molestation and daddy problems, and a crude montage depicting the two acting out sexual fantasies in accordance to holidays (boorishly set to Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl”), the film flies by the circumstances of their “falling in love” in order to get to the point where – Surprise! Deadpool has terminal cancer. The film lingers on the real pain of this common occurrence in a way that I don’t mind. “When you have cancer, it's not you that suffers the most, but the ones who care about you.” So says Deadpool. It’s a poignant moment that I won’t deny the film credit for.

            The problem with the film is probably the tone. Those Fourth-Wall breaks designed to send fan-boy chills down everyone’s spine are somehow lessened by the deliberateness of the plot. When the film was in pre-production, I dreamt of a Deadpool film full of shamelessly bloody comedy with a simple vengeance plot told in a very loose way by the Merc with a Mouth himself. Something like Kill Bill Vol. 1, but looser and with more blood. Interestingly enough, it is kind of structured like Kill Bill Vol. 1, but there seems to be a huge lack of freedom in the film’s substance. That may be due to its debt to the X-Men films. With knowledge of the filmmakers’ love of Deadpool, I can only assume that 20^th Century Fox demanded that the film must have obvious ties to the X-Men Universe. That meant more restrictions in the field of manipulated realism. It also created a kind Amazing Spiderman 2-ish sense of character crowding. I mean, do we really need Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead in there to generate excitement?

            The villain is, as the smoldering opening credit sequence promises, a British villain. He’s bad. He can’t feel pain. He likes making Deadpool’s life miserable. That’s all. This is at least what the audience knows. I don’t know if it’s awesome or sad that the best relationship Deadpool has in the film is with the Indian taxi driver, who refers to him as “Mr. Pool”. Or is it the ex-drug addict blind black lady whom Deadpool lives with? It’s unfortunate that these characters are left out of the big third act battle, which takes place on the S.H.I.E.L.D. freaking Helicarrier. That battle does include the only two X-Men that were unimportant enough to serve as Deadpool’s sidekicks. But at the point when Negasonic Teenage Warhead goes all Negasonic Teenage Warhead on the British villain’s sidekick, Angel (who is even more one-dimensional than her master if you can believe it), and ditches her black clothing for a pretty silly looking X-Men costume, you can almost hear the sighs from the true Deadpool fans.

            I think the true Deadpool fans will enjoy the film, for no other reason than the fact that a Deadpool similar to the one they know and love from the comics is in a movie. But for fans like me, who wanted to see a movie charged with all the greatness of twenty-five years of comics, it was a disappointment. Even a lot of the comedy is topical with the use of jokes like “Hashtag Hit-and-Run” and other ones that will have lost relevance in ten years. And the visual style unfortunately conforms to the quick cut action scenes of today. A lot of the film conforms to the action films of today. Those who thought that an R-rated comic book movie would be somehow different are wrong. The film went through so much hardship just to get an R rating, only to waste it and place unnecessary emphasis on language and nudity.

            Yes, I think it would have been a better film if it had been shot better. Yes, I think it would have lived on longer without the topical comedy. Yes, I think that any film should have a small number of complex, multidimensional characters, rather than several one-dimensional ones who only serve as makers of war and nothing else. It’s my opinion that these flaws exist and that they make Deadpool an underwhelming experience. I really wanted to believe that the film was innovative and different, that it would change superhero films forever. But instead it was cliché and mundane in ways that were both annoying and distracting. If you want to make innovative comic book films, look at movies like Spider-Man 2 and The Dark Knight. These are films that focused on characterization, just like the comics. The action and humor was only great because of the focus on who the characters were as people. If James Gunn is right, and Deadpool does have a Pulp Fiction-like effect on the superhero film industry, I hope the films made because of Deadpool’s success are without these flaws. Perhaps then, something innovative will come along.