During the lead up to the release of Deadpool, I started to feel left out in the cold. Everyone seemed to be really excited for it, amused by its off-kilter marketing, and I just couldn’t care less. Ryan Reynolds has never worked as a leading man. The oh-man-so-random humor that serves as Deadpool’s trademark is the sort of thing that’s only funny to cackling teenagers. Plus, action sequences that are full of characters weightlessly flying around, doing unrealistic flips, and CGI destruction that lacks any impact or danger are just about the most boring things to sit through, and its trailers were full of that sort of garbage. I went into Deadpool already convinced it was going to be the worst. A funny thing can happen when you keep an open mind though—you can be surprised—and after I gave the movie an honest chance it turned out that Deadpool wasn’t terrible at all. It’s actually pretty mediocre.
So what is Deadpool, anyway? He’s a motor-mouthed mercenary named Wade Wilson (Reynolds) who was put through traumatic experiments that not only gave him healing powers and left his entire body severely scarred, but that also shattered his mind and left him in a state of constant hallucination and mania. This movie is an origin story, so you meet Wade before his procedure, you meet the acid-tongued hooker he falls in love with, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and you meet the evil scientist who turns him into a monster, Ajax (Ed Skrein). What follows is a pretty typical revenge story with a little damsel in distress heroics thrown in for good measure. But, you know, colored with that trademarked Deadpool raunchy randomness.
The character of Deadpool appears in just about every scene of this movie, and even when he’s not on screen the chances are good that whatever you’re looking at is going to have his voice-over narration playing over it, so Reynolds’ performance shoulders a good deal of the weight of responsibility in regards to the success or failure of the film. The good news is that he fits the material pretty well. His problem in the past has been that there’s nothing appealing about a white male with movie star looks condescending to everything around him in a smarmy, sarcastic tone—and that’s basically the guy’s whole screen persona. Maybe mean male model could make for a good villain here and there, but how often has it worked for a protagonist? Never. The reason it kind of works here is that Deadpool isn’t a hero, he’s a psychopath, an open wound of vulnerability who’s pretty much defined by his pain and his self-absorption. The loss of his looks is a driving force in his motivation, and given the fact that he never shuts up, like a jittery teenager who can’t close their mouth, he’s supposed to be kind of annoying. This very well could be the role that Reynolds was born to play.
Not every aspect of the film worked out as well as its star though. The story could have used a little work. The bad guys are about as blank slate and generic as a group of bad guys can get, and Deadpool’s struggles against them really do add up to little more than an origin story and a rescue mission. In essence, the story is here just to serve as a loose framework for Deadpool to make jokes and decapitate people within, so if the humor and the action work for you, it’s not much of a concern, but if they don’t, you’ll find yourself wanting. Seeing as 90% of the quips in this thing are just too obvious to be funny, or are relying on things like shock value or randomness to have any impact, they didn’t work for me (this many years into the internet age, is it really possible to shock anyone with raunch or absurdity anymore?). And seeing as the action mostly involves an immortal protagonist who can instantly heal mowing through a faceless mass of low-level goons, it’s pretty hard to get excited by any of the violence.
All of that try-hard struggle to make something bloody and gross can’t help but make one wonder who this movie is supposed to be for. Sure, the comics that serve as the source material are boundary-pushing, and pretty violent, and a little gross, but they’ve never been rated for mature audiences, so why the need to go that far here? There are so many sexually deviant acts depicted in Deadpool, which are all meant to offend, that it can’t be argued that the film isn’t sophomoric. It’s downright juvenile, unabashedly so, and yet it comes with an R-rating that’s supposed to keep the underaged and inexperienced audience who would get the most shock and delight out of its humor from watching it. It would seem that this is a movie designed to be consumed by 15-year-olds sneaking into the theater. It’s a strange business model, but one that appears to have somehow worked.
Who’s going to find this material funny isn’t the heart of the problem with the film’s focus on sex jokes and random absurdity though, the real problem is that the quips and the silliness have never been the most interesting thing about Deadpool as a character—the most interesting thing about Deadpool is his doomed nature, his ceaseless pain. This is a character who will never win, who will never find anything in this world but suffering, but who will never let that break him, and who will never stop raging against the unfeeling nature of the universe with pure, manic determinism. That edge has been taken off of the character here, probably to make him more pleasant and palatable for mainstream audiences, and he’s lost a lot of his intrigue as a result. Heck, other than his physical malformities (which aren’t nearly as lumpy and puss-leaking and horrific here as they are in the source material), this version of Deadpool kind of has a great life. He’s got a home, real friends, a girl with whom he shares a passionate romance… it’s much too rosy a reality for this murderous character, and for a film that’s selling itself as being so much darker and stranger than your typical superhero fare. Hopefully the inevitable sequel digs deeper to find the pathos that sets Wade Wilson apart from, say, Peter Parker.
Ultimately, Deadpool maintains a manic enough tone and creates enough fun moments that people are going to like it, including a certain subset of young people who are really going to like it. It’s a crowd pleaser. It’s not a movie that’s going to age well though. There isn’t anything in here that’s really all that transgressive. Somebody oh-so-randomly masturbating with a stuffed unicorn is only shocking when it’s juxtaposed with the glossy, homogenized aesthetic of the modern superhero movie. Watching something that looks like a superhero movie be dirty is a trick that’s only going to wow audiences once, and for people like me, who have been inundated with comic books and mature-rated genre material for decades now, the whole schtick already feels pretty old-hat. The film does have a Deadpool rap in its soundtrack though, so it gets some brownie points for that. Not nearly enough productions pay rappers to do soundtrack work with plot-specific lyrics anymore. If we’re going to be keep making so many big, silly popcorn movies every year, it’s a trend that needs to come back.
