I promise that the film is more than DMX’s “X Gon Give It To Ya” for ninety minutes, despite what the trailer might suggest. Ryan Reynold’s passion project about the fast, funny, foul-mouthed uber-violent merc with a mouth that finally makes up for his piss-poor debut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is finally up on the big-screen with the first superhero film of 2016, Deadpool.
When former Special Forces operative Wade Wilson gets cancer in everything bar his right pinkie, left testie, and third nipple he volunteers for a rogue experiment that gives him super-powers and a super-unf*ckable face. So bestowed with accelerated healing powers and a face like Bea Arthur’s testicles he uses this great power for great irresponsibility as he becomes a gun for hire. You know the rest of the story doesn’t really matter: bad guy steals his girl, he’s got to get her back, lots of craziness and an insane amount of meta references repeatedly punches you in your face for the next hour and forty eight minutes.
Look, the first thing you need to know is that this isn’t a comic book movie, this is a Deadpool movie, which is basically a comic book movie turned up all the way up to f*cking eleven. It is really violent, like really really violent for a comic book movie, it is filled with profanity, lewd jokes, lots of sexual content and nudity - so it’s not for kids any more than 2010’s Kick-Ass was for kids. But it is entertaining, really entertaining, with rapid-fire non-stop jokes from start to finish and some great action sequences, even though most of them were shown to us in the trailers and TV spots.
The film is almost a little bit like an episode of Family Guy where it’s just one joke after another after another and if one joke doesn’t land it doesn’t really matter because the next one is only five seconds away. The film is filled with so many nods, winks and digs at comic book movies, easter eggs and other references that you could be forgiven for thinking that the film is suffering from Tourettes Syndrome with all these twitches. But the film really does live and die on Ryan Reynolds charm and comedic timing - he’s just so damn funny and self-deprecating throughout the runtime, taking the piss out of every other comic book movie and his own stabs at comic book films.
And while we’re at it, how awesome has all the marketing for this film been? They left no stone unturned when promoting this film, from capitalising on holidays to producing material that tricks your girlfriend into seeing Deadpool to advertising the film using only emoticons. Once again, it was Ryan Reynolds comedic charm that has turned Deadpool from a niche character only known by comic nerds, to the character everyone is talking about this year (especially when we Batman, Superman, Captain America and Iron Man all making appearances in the next few months.)
Of course don’t forget that this film also exists in the Fox-Men shared universe and even though there are lots of continuity issues when compared to the previous seven X-Men films, this can all be forgiven thanks to the continual fourth wall breaking and acknowledging that even Fox don’t know if this is set in the McAvoy era or Stewart era of X-Men movies.
The film isn’t perfect. The development of the villains is really really thin, I mean beyond paper-thin, more like Christian Bale going for another Oscar weight-loss thin and the climax happens on top of some big structure that they never really explain what it is or why the villains are there in the first place - maybe they did explain it and I just never heard it because I was laughing so much, that could easily have happened during this movie. But these complaints are only little niggles, honestly you’re too busy laughing and having a genuinely good time to care about these kinds of things.
Overall, this film deserves an audience just for its effort alone, but thankfully there are so many great reasons to see this. Fans of comic book movies are going to have a good laugh, Deadpool fans are going to see this as a near-perfect interpretation of the character and everyone else is going to applauding with the rest of the cinema when the end credits start to roll.
Deadpool gets Four and a Half Stars (or Four and a Half of Bea Arthur’s testicles - I believe she has eight, and she hangs them around her neck, and they’re all hers and not anyone else’s)
No comments:
Post a Comment