So I recently saw "Deadpool" this weekend. I wrote up a review on Examiner.com... Here it is:
Deadpool (2016) R for strong violence, language, sexual content, graphic nudity. Dir: Tim Miller
Directed by Tim Miller and starring Ryan Reynolds, "Deadpool" is about Wade Wilson who is a sword-wielding, gun-toting mercenary who discovers he has cancer and goes through a mysterious treatment via villain Ajax/Francis (Ed Skrein) and becomes Deadpool, a super mutant, invulnerable to pain and any lasting damage, at the same time becoming so severely disfigured he cannot get himself to face his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Deadpool decides to take his revenge on Ajax and his army of mutant slaves/soldiers, while Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) tries to convince him to take a more heroic/moral route and join the X-Men.
It seems they really wanted to make a fairly hard R-rated Marvel film, and they have succeeded. There is plenty of everything. It's also a very jokey film, bordering on comic book parody, which isn't too different from its source. It is kind of like a mixture of "Kick-Ass", "Ferris Bueller", and "Blade", with a huge helping of referential 80's related humor via first-person narration told by Deadpool. One can't help but think most of the humor may have originated from Reynolds himself because we've seen him do this stuff before.
Much like his previous somewhat forgettable comic book movie efforts, "Green Lantern" and "X-Men Origins: Wolverine", Ryan Reynolds' smarmy humor is in full-mode here. Luckily his quips are more appropriate to the extreme situations around him, making him a pretty amusing, or at least a useful, narrator of the story and his backstory. The film moves back and forth quite frequently. His backstory is surprisingly grim and tragic, and Reynolds surprises us in how he handles drama and emotion, which he rarely got to do in the other films. If you are not really into Ryan Reynolds in the first place--he probably may come off as an immature frat boy-- you might find some of his more dramatic turns in this film more to your liking. There's a strong romantic element at the core of this film, which brings the emotions that is quite welcome in so-called "mindless" action movies like these.
There is a ton of referential, nudge-nudge wink-wink comic-related humor, often breaking the fourth wall, with jokes referencing the 80's, such as Deadpool's love of Wham! and Voltron. Thankfully, the writing still keeps this film character-driven. Yes, there is a lot of throwaway humor, but when the film moves to a somewhat more dramatic territory, Wade/Deadpool and Vanessa are likable enough that you want them to succeed in the end.
The rest of my review is found here:
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