He’s the foul-mouthed, red and black-sheep of the superhero world. But can Marvel’s ‘Deadpool’ really make a box-office killing?
Buckle up. We are plunged into a bloodbath on the middle of an American freeway where Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is Deadpool, a ‘Merc with a Mouth’ and who wisely wore red to hide the spilling of his own blood. But is that the X-Men‘s Colossus (Stefan Kapicic)? What’s a Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand)? And how did we get here? Cue flashback…
Wade Wilson is a regular at Sister Margaret’s Home for Wayward Girls, actually a front for a bar where the rough and the restless hang out between jobs. Wade bemoans his life hiding between banter and benders with drinks named after competing sex-acts. It’s here he meets Vanessa (Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin) and after flippancy, foreplay and fornication, they have a whole year of marking holidays in their own special way. (Naming one of her legs Thanksgiving and one named Christmas, Wade admits want to see her between the holidays. Ba-doom, tush…). But amid what could become a mixture of the NRA‘s version of the Lifestyle channel, tragedy appears about to strike. Wade finds he has cancer throughout his body and the diagnosis is dark.
Wade (Ryan Reynolds) and Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) face a big obstacle in their relationship…
But he’s offered a way out and a cure – join a shadowy organisation that is making superheroes, an off-shoot of the Weapon X program that produced an adamantium-laced Wolverine. He accepts and sneaks out of Vanessa’s home, swearing (profanely) that he won’t return and ruin her life until he’s cured. However, the deal he’s made goes South and he is subjected to all kinds of painful experiments by the sadistic Ajax (Ed Skrein). His latent mutant ability to painfully regenerate is eventually triggered and he escapes, but he’s convinced Vanessa could never love the scarred, brutalised man he’s become. Instead he sets out to make Ajax pay.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled freeway…
Let’s be brutally honest. Deadpool and its knowing sense of chaos could easily have been a self-indulgent mess that pleased no-one, but the result on screen is actually a self-indulgent mess that should more than please the party-faithful and a wider demographic willing to take a punt on a wild ride. The marketing for the film has been both subversive and in-your-face – unapologetically setting out its stall and taking every opportunity to lampoon not only the superhero genre but itself, refusing to take anything seriously.So there will be view cinema-goers that will go into a screening without an idea of what to expect – the only questions being, does it pay off and can I get away with taking my kids to see it? (Answer: Yes it does and No. This one’s just for you and will be our little dirty secret, k?)
This isn’t the first anarchic, ‘adult’-orientated superhero movie. In recent years the adaptations of, say, Mark Millar’s work (think Wanted, Kick-Ass and Kingsman: The Secret Service) have ridden the wave of deliberate controversy, taking a traditional formula and sprinkling enough moments of profanity and extreme violence to at least energise their opening weekends and grab some headlines. But while those films sometimes felt like ‘look at me‘ teenage-rebellion – all naughty-words and flipping the finger at whatever rebellion they could muster – Deadpool isn’t here to tease you: it simply embraces its own distinct well-established madness from the start. Yes, it’s undeniably foul-mouthed and crude, but it’s not illicitly sipping stolen beer and glancing over its shoulder to double-check your disapproval… but buying a bottle of cheap, hard liquor necking it and inviting you to share its bender.
A down and dirty outlier though it may be, it’s firmly set in the world of the X-Men (ie: FOX’s eminent domain) strand of the Marvel Universe – though there’s references to Samuel L Jackson and what appears to be a crashed hellicarrier, both from the Sony/Disney strand). There are far too many comic-culture easter-eggs to list – they are an organic part of the film’s DNA from the very first frame and take-in elements from several continuities – but the constant machine-gun like banter of hit-and miss comic-culture references means that there’s a decent success-rate even if some ultimately fall by the wayside exhausted. While it helps to know your Marvel continuity, as long as you’re reasonably up-to-date on superhero movies, you’ll get enough to chuckle, snigger and occasionally guffaw.
There’s fun to be had with the visual effects. Like the dizzying looping narrative that takes us back and forth through Wade Wilson’s life and adventures, the opening shot takes us up, over, under and through a car-crash. But rather than echoing the much-copied, ultra-clean Matrix-style of shooting this is strictly the Punisher-meets-Bugs Bunny remit required. Amid the chaos, it’s actually the human element that gives Deadpool its twisted backbone. Ryan Reynolds, who has championed this no-holes-barred version since his character’s disappointing inclusion on X-Men Origins: Wolverine, puts blood sweat and tears into it and even when wearing a mask to hide his ‘avacado’ face still gives us a ‘human’ side to the manic mutant when it matters most. Morena Baccarin (here just as good as her more straight-laced Firefly and Homeland duties) is the love of Wade’s life and from the moment her flippant sex-worker takes on Wade in a sexed-up version of Monty Python’s ‘Four Yorkshiremen‘ sketch, it’s love at first bite – the actress more than holding her own and making Wade hold his.
Like a brilliantly-designed sadistic rollercoaster, it’s a mix of precisely-calculated ducking and diving masquerading as free-fall anarchy. The supporting cast includes Gina Carano, T J Miller and even Stan Lee in a strip club and everyone gives it their all. Yes, it lasts a little too long and leaves you just a bit too dizzy, never quite giving you enough to catch breath or find anything to firmly hold onto, but you’ll likely come away with a grin on your face and a headache in the morning. It was a risky proposition to initiate and even harder to pull off (stop it!) but its strong opening-weekend box-office, around $125 million almost twice above even the best pre-release estimates, will secure it a sequel. As a franchise that might mean spreading the material too thinly, familiarity ultimately breeding contempt, but so far its a nice acerbic antidote to the sometimes pontificating mainstream Marvel movies and a full-on guilty pleasure.
9/10
