Movie Review: 'Deadpool'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- "I may be super, but I'm no hero," protests the sorta-superhero called Deadpool in Deadpool.
But his movie delivers, if not heroically, then at least entertainingly.
If you're as superheroed and spandexed out as I am by the movie landscape of late, then you're probably a lot lot less than excited at the prospect of yet another Marvel Comics character to establish a multiplex beachhead.
Imagine my surprise, then, that Deadpool turns out to be a delight instead of a chore.
Violent and self-aware and surprisingly amusing, it was originally intended as the eighth installment in the X-Men screen series. An anti-superhero thriller, Deadpool, brings back the title character, who was featured in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine and was played – then and now – by Ryan Reynolds.
The film's chief function is to supply the origin story for what many fans consider Marvel Comics' most unconventional antihero. But that assignment has been carried out with more than the expected dollop of humor. This movie is funny, shooting jokes and gags and bits at us with machine-gun rapidity.
The premise: a former Special Forces agent, Wade Wilson, played by Reynolds, in an attempt to cure his cancer, is subjected to an experimental process the result of which is that he gains accelerated healing powers, disfigured skin, an unstable mind, a talkative tongue, and a demented sense of humor.
In short, he becomes an indestructible mercenary, and develops an alter ego, which he calls Deadpool.
And he begins trying to track down Ajax (Ed Skrein), the torturer who nearly destroyed him and ruined his appearance to such an extent that he'd prefer that the love of his life, a prostitute named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), think that he's dead.
Somehow, despite flippant Deadpool's above-the-fray wisecracking – he's a sufferer who now dishes out suffering to those deserving it -- we find ourselves rooting for Deadpool and Vanessa to get past all this.
The director, Tim Miller, with a background in advertising, animation, and visual effects, makes his feature-film directorial debut, working from a script by Rhett Reese and Paul Warnick that doesn't exactly aim for the stars, but that has a raunchy irreverence about it that chips away at our genre burnout.
Reynolds certainly seems to relish playing the wisenheimer motormouth, a sardonic and sociopathic killing machine who frequently breaks the fourth wall and delivers his witty observations directly to the audience as part of what often amounts to a self-containing spoof of the genre.
As Marvel's first R-rated offering, the film probably pushes the salty language and graphic violence buttons a bit too vigorously. But at least it's an approach that fits the master plan.
Of course, whether this outing results in a launched franchise remains to be seen. But standing alone, the film is an admittedly distinctive attraction.
So we'll track down 2½ stars out of 4. Deadpool is anything but dead.
