For sheer sassy, smart-assy fun, it’s hard to imagine
that anything is going to beat Deadpool
– this year at least.
The latest big-screen outing for a Marvel character,
Deadpool originally appeared in comic form in 1991, starting out as a
supervillain before morphing into an anti-hero.
His big-screen debut arrived in the 2009 film, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, when Ryan
Reynolds wielded the katanas for the first time.
But the ‘Merc with a Mouth’ has now got his own movie,
and it’s a cracking piece of entertainment.
After small-time and essentially good-hearted
mercenary Wade Wilson is diagnosed with multiple cancers, he’s offered the
chance of a cure – a cure that will also bestow on him incredible powers.
Unfortunately, there turns out to be a rather unexpected
side effect and, after christening himself Deadpool, Wilson sets off to exact
revenge on those who put him into that position.
There’s no shortage of violence – but unlike many
comic book stories, the violence here has consequences.
In that sense, together with the humour, it’s
reminiscent of Tarantino. But what we also get here is the breaking of the
fourth wall, as Deadpool speaks directly to the audience throughout the film.
The character is amoral, bisexual, camp, gobby, violent
and a Wham! fan, with a self-awareness and fuck-this attitude that reminds me
of Hellboy.
Indeed, the Wham! thing brought to mind Hellboy and
Abe Sapien’s drunken duet of Barry Manilow’s Can’t Smile Without You in Hellboy
II.
The jokes come thick and fast – the excellent script
from Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick never lets the pace drop – and the action
sequences are top notch.
Returning as the eponymous antihero, Reynolds
is superb, while Ed Skrein makes a strong – British, of course! – villain,
Ajax.
However much you might expect this to be
very much a bloke film, there’s a love story that could broaden the audience,
and four very strong female characters in Morena Baccarin as Deadpool’s
girlfriend Vanessa; Gina Carano as Angel, a superhuman, mutated member of
Ajax’s team; Brianna Hildebrand as teenage X-Men trainee Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Leslie Uggams
as Blind Al, a sassy elderly woman with a penchant for cocaine who is Deadpool’s
roommate.
And while he cannot actually claim the
credit for creating the character of Deadpool, X-Men co-creator and Marvel’s
answer to the All Father and the Godfather combined (if you were to believe his
own hype), Stan Lee manages to shoehorn himself into a brief cameo.
If you’re looking for philosophy, then Deadpool is probably not going to be the
movie for you – although I will point out that slavery in exchange for
effective medical treatment could be viewed as a comment on a society where
many workers cannot afford to dissent as it’s their boss who pays their medical
insurance.
But hey, that’s really not the most
important thing here.
First and foremost, this is a thoroughly
entertaining romp that sees Marvel itself actually give the entire rather
po-faced superhero genre a massive slap. Fab stuff.
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