There’s an excellent chance that you’ll be so busy laughing at the R-rated superhero comedy Deadpool that you might overlook the film’s flaws. Deadpool dedicates about half of its running time to a very old-fashioned origin story, and tries to hide that fact by constantly cutting between our hero getting his powers and a high-energy action sequence. It works for a little while, until you realize that not only has Deadpool spent half the film on the character’s origin, it has also spent that same half on a single, solitary fight scene. It’s not a bad fight, but it ain’t that great either.
So Deadpool is not the second coming of superhero movies, but that doesn’t mean it it’s bad. The film, about an ultra-violent mercenary with a penchant for bad jokes and a never-explained awareness that he’s in a superhero movie, hits all the conventional action movie beats but hits most of them in an unconventional way. And that starts right during the opening credits, which replaces all the actors’ names with stock archetypes like “British Villain,” and the writers’ names with “The Real Heroes Here.”
20th Century Fox
Also: SoundTreks Reviews The ‘Deadpool’ Soundtrack
The plot: Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is a mercenary who falls for the perfect woman (Morena Baccarin), then discovers to his horror that he has terminal cancer. He walks out on his lady love to spare her the pain of watching him die, then winds up in a secret government program that will cure his disease and give him superpowers… but only after torturing him, brutally, for months.
When Wade gets out he has healing powers but also a grotesque skin condition, and he vows to take revenge against the scientist who ruined his face. He also vows not to return to his lover because he thinks he’s too ugly to be loved, so all his time goes into finding his enemies – Francis (Ed Skrein) and Angel (Gina Carano) – and killing them brutally with his swords.
20th Century Fox
Ryan Reynolds was made for this role, quipping the quippiest quips and prancing about like a Batman villain who just happens to not technically be evil. More importantly he understands that the origin story, conventional though it may seem on paper, has significance. Director Tim Miller treats the tragedy of Wilson’s condition like the living nightmare it truly is, and only briefly treats the fantastical promise of a cure as a godsend. Like real-life cancer treatments, the process Wilson goes through is painful and, quite understandably, makes him feel damaged.
It’s easy to write off Deadpool’s inability to reconnect with his girlfriend Vanessa as a plot contrivance, or simple vanity, but it’s a truly human element to this otherwise cartoonish character that makes his mania seem forgivable. Like last year’s The Martian, what we see in Deadpool is a story about a good sense of humor getting people through life’s most difficult moments, and it’s inspiring to a point: you probably shouldn’t decapitate anybody but you can at least try to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.
20th Century Fox
Cameos from other X-Men characters – like Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and no one else because Deadpool says they couldn’t afford bigger stars – are welcome treats. The action is bloody and stylized and engaging, but functionally rather conventional; perhaps the funniest thing about Deadpool is that the hero is completely self-aware about everything except action movie clichés that are so old they could be Deadpool’s dad.
Deadpool may not go quite far enough with its self-aware shenanigans or its genre subversions to achieve genuine brilliance, but it’s an incredibly fun film. In many respects it’s the best X-Men movie yet, because it seems to care less about “world building” and “big ideas” than about a single interesting character with a unique voice, joking his way through a satisfying, albeit conventional story. The filmmakers’ affection for Deadpool rubs off all over us, and thankfully, rubs off hard.
Top Photo: 20th Century Fox
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
Slideshow: Ten Great Movies That Broke the Fourth Wall
10 Great Movies That Broke The Fourth Wall
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Blazing Saddles (1974)
Mel Brooks was a master at breaking the fourth wall for comedic reasons, and his most famous example might be from his 1974 epic Blazing Saddles. In the climax of the film, the characters all get into a massive brawl that eventually spills off the set and into the sets of other movies. The final shootout between the hero and the villain takes place in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood where Blazing Saddles is playing, and where the characters watch themselves on screen.
Photo: Warner Bros.
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Spaceballs (1987)
Commenting on the gross over-commercialization of Star Wars, Spaceballs depicts characters flaunting and playing with the film's own tie-in merchandise. The villain plays with his own toys, the Yoda character run a merchandise shop out of his cave, and, in the film's most metaphysical moment, several characters watch a VHS tape of the movie, eventually fast-forwarding to the very scene they're in at that moment.
Photo: MGM
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Henry V (1944)
Laurence Olivier's film version of Shakespeare's Henry V features a brilliant wall-breaking conceit. The film begins as a backstage drama, wherein we witness actors putting on Shakespeare's play at The Globe. As the play/film continues, however, the stage elements begin to melt away, and eventually we're no longer on stage, and just watching a movie.
Photo: Eagle-Lion Distributor
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The Holy Mountain (1973)
No one likes a metaphysical prank better than arthouse giant Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose midnight freakout The Holy Mountain features a cadre of interplanetary beings who go on a spiritual quest together (amongst many, many other things). At the film's end, Jodorowsky, eager to leave us with a grin, commands, from on screen, to pull the cameras back and reveal that it was all just a movie after all.
Picture: ABCKO Records
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Persona (1966)
One of the best films ever made, Ingmar Bergman's Persona uses film as a weapon to fight off reason and present the abstract as a new language. The film's very first shot is a projector lamp firing up, revealing the artificiality of what we're about to see. If that's not enough, Bergman and his photographer, Sven Nyqvist, also appear at the film's end, filming the characters as they disperse. It's a movie, friends. The artificiality is part of the story.
Picture: MGM
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Anomalisa (2015)
Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated animated film features a customer service author who seems to have fallen in love with a plain-looking woman while on a business trip away from his wife. The film is animated, and we're constantly aware of the little seams in the character's faces where their mouth parts are removed and replaced during the animation process. Throughout the film, however, the characters become aware of those seams as well...
Picture: Paramount
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Funny Games (1997 & 2007)
Michael Haneke made the same film twice, once in German and once in English, to illustrate the way audiences consume movies. In both versions, a pair of white-clad ruffians invade the home of a bourgeois couple to torture and main and perhaps kill them. In a bizarre twist, when something doesn't go their way, the ruffians grab a remote control, rewind the film itself, and undo the previous actions.
Picture: Warner Independent
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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
One of the funniest and wittiest films of the 2000s, Shane Black's comic noir featured a post-credits scene wherein the two lead characters, played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Val Kilmer, address the audience directly, talking about how everyone turned out. Kilmer apologizes for cussing too much.
Picture: Warner Bros.
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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Monty Python's comedic masterpiece, still often regarded as one of the funniest films of all time, takes every opportunity to comment on it's own cinematic self. The narrator refers to certain scenes by number. Modern day policemen seem hot on the trail of the ancient characters. King Arthur evades an animated monster because the animator has a heart attack. And the ending is to die for.
Picture: Cinema 5 Distributing
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Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Joe Dante's super-wacky follow-up to his already-wacky horror comedy plays like a live-action Warner Bros. cartoon. For much of the film, we are presented with a straightforward tale of evil critters who take over a high-tech New York highrise. But about halfway through, the film sputters and breaks, and we see that gremlins have also invaded the projection booth. An usher then enters the theaters and entreats a patron, Hulk Hogan, to shout the creatures back into restarting the film. Oh yes, and Leonard Maltin is killed by gremlins while reviewing Gremlins.
Picture: Warner Bros.
