Deadpool

I think if you had asked a huge comics fan ten years ago - when comic book movies were becoming a big thing, but had not become quite the titanic force in Hollywood that they are now - if they thought a Deadpool movie would ever happen, they'd probably have said no. Yet here we are, with a hard-R Deadpool movie that has been doing tremendously.

Deadpool, the character, is kind of a satire of both superheroes in general and also the uber-dark comic antiheroes that became popular in the 90s (which I've sort of suspected is largely influenced by people misinterpreting Watchmen and idolizing Rorschach.) Mind you - Deadpool is, to a large degree, one of those uber-dark protagonists. While Marvel superheroes seem less concerned about using non-lethal methods than their DC counterparts, they still tend toward a kind of reluctance to use force - it's what makes them heroic. Deadpool kills a whole lot of people in pretty gruesome ways.

He's not really a superhero, and one part of the film that sort of qualifies as a running gag is how the more traditional superhero, X-Man Colossus, keeps trying to recruit Deadpool to their more traditional superhero team and keeps being shocked at A. the lengths to which Deadpool goes to avoid this and B. the methods he uses that really put him beyond the standard superhero pale.

Deadpool is probably most famous for being aware of his nature as a fictional character - something they absolutely do not shy away from in the film. Deadpool makes tons of fourth-wall-shattering jokes, including snarky opening titles and lots of jokes about Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, James McAvoy, and Ryan Reynolds himself (with tons of self-deprecating jokes about the abysmal failure of Green Lantern.)

It's way more meta than you typically expect a big-budget blockbuster to be, and the success of the movie speaks volumes about how primed the general public is to enjoy weird postmodernism. And of course, given how huge superhero movies have been for the past decade (or longer - while Iron Man launched it into overdrive, the first X-Men movie really started this new era,) it's about time we have a movie that deconstructs the genre.

That said, Deadpool (the movie) doesn't entirely escape the genre that it is parodying. While Morena Baccarin's Vanessa is a bit underwritten and suffers from damsel-syndrome, the movie does set aside the snark for a bit to deal with both the serious nature of their relationship and also the seriousness of Wade Wilson's cancer - the disease whose treatment winds up giving him his Wolverine-like regeneration ability (but with no adamantium-coated skeleton and a cartoonish disregard for his own pain, we see a lot more gruesome damage inflicted on Deadpool than we ever saw for Wolverine.)

Vanessa is an anchor that does give Deadpool just enough humanity to feel like something more than a hyper-violent Bugs Bunny, though it would have been nice to see her define a little more on her own.

That said, the movie really is all about Deadpool himself, and every other character is kind of defined in relation to him (most of them as "that guy that Deadpool just killed.")

It's not a perfect movie, but given how out-there a concept it is, it's remarkable that it A. got made and B. turned out so well. I'd say if you were intrigued by the marketing, you'll probably enjoy the movie.

One disclaimer though: This is an R-Rated movie for a reason. Yes, it has some X-Men in it. Yes, it's a comic book movie. Don't bring your freaking kids to it. (Probably fine for teenagers if you don't mind them seeing a bit of nudity and a pretty hefty number of severed limbs.)