I’ve been waiting for this movie to come out since I heard that they were actually making the damn thing. Even then I was hesitant to believe that they actually got Ryan Reynolds to play the evil merc, what with the whole Hal Jordan/Green Lantern fiasco but maybe Reynolds has more pull in Hollywood than I give him credit for.

Anywho, here’s the round-up of Tim Miller’s directorial debut, Deadpool (2016) – he’s the guy who created that weird ink opening sequence in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Please note that there may be spoilers.  Read at your own risk.

THE STORY:

Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds – The Proposal) is a mouth Special Forces operative who gets dismissed for questionable behavior. He now spends his time as a mercenary for hire, terrorizing random petty stalkers for a fee. One day he meets Vanessa (Morena Baccarin – Spy), whose personality is the perfect match to his, and he starts thinking about settling down. This is, of course, also the same time he finds out that he has terminal cancer. Grasping at straws, Wilson decides to enlist as a participant of an experimental procedure that might give him a chance at survival. The facility is run by mutants Ajax (Ed Skrein – The Transporter Refueled) with his assistant Angel Dust (Gina Carano – Haywire), and their whole operation aims to turn people with terminal diseases and wake the mutated DNA in their genes to make an army with superpowers. When Wilson learns that Ajax plans to sell him off to the highest bidder after his latent mutation of super healing kicks in, he finds a way to escape and vows to get revenge on Ajax and Angel Dust. Two members of the X-Men, Colussus (Stephan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), complicate Wilson’s mission as they are hell bent on recruiting him over to their side.

THE GOOD:

1. Ryan Reynolds. This was the role he was born to play – tell him that he can retire now that he’s done this and Van Wilder. Seriously though, he the only actor who can pull off playing the mouthy mercenary. This is almost enough to earn my forgiveness for the trash that is the Wolverine origin story.
2. Morena Baccarin is super, duper, ridiculously pretty. As far as leading ladies-slash-damsels and distress go, she’s not nearly as annoying. She also kept up with Ryan Reynold’s comedic expertise with seemingly no effort at all, which, I’m sure is a lot harder than it looks.
3. The pacing. The movie was quick and snappy and unless you have an extreme case of ADD, your mind wouldn’t stray away from the story.
4. It was an incredibly funny movie. I guess it’s to be expected considering the titular character, but in a sea of origin movies full of angst, this was refreshingly light and the plot was almost dainty.
5. R-16!!! Can you imagine the shittiness that would’ve happened had they watered it down to a PG-13 rating? Thank goodness to whoever fought tooth and nail to keep it at R-16 – I’m sure somebody from 20^th Century Fox blew out a fuse when they learned that they were limiting the target audience for this movie, but this was so, so worth it.

THE BAD:

1. The British villain. I guess he’s okay in the context of the movie as a whole, but in this day and age, this level of villainy is almost laughable.

   

2. The low budget. It was almost painfully obvious that they made this film with limited funding – I mean while the action sequences were very good, they were also very few. It says on the film’s IMDB trivia page that somebody from the studio cut seven million off the film’s budget last minute, resulting in a lot of the chase scenes and action sequences being thrown out. So yeah, that’s the real reason why Deadpool kept forgetting his guns and ammo. Screw you, 20^th Century Fox!
3. I wish they showed more of Blind Al. She looks like a fun character.
4. What ever happened to Angel Dust? It’s a stupid thing, but in the end I kept thinking ‘well surely she’s going to get back up and try to kill them all’ because technically she didn’t die, right? I’m sure I saw Colossus carrying her unconscious form from the wreckage and considering her mutation, I was expecting her to be up and about quite quickly.

THE UGLY:

1. The self-depracating bullshit that they made Deadpool feel when facing Vanessa again. Pfft, oh please, they’ve literally been through hell and back, don’t frakkin’ tell me that he’ll feel all conscious because he’s scarred and ugly now. Surely Wade knows that Vanessa would see past all that; she did stay with him through the cancer scare after all.

All in all Tim Miller’s Deadpool (2016) was an extremely enjoyable movie. It was sufficiently violent for a comic book movie but it wasn’t overwhelmingly gory. The pacing was quick and witty just like the titular character and while some people could complain that the plot was overly simple, the story unfolded in such a clear and precise way that it’s hard to complain too much. I particularly liked that the sequences of events – the flashbacks within flashbacks – actually felt like it stayed true to Deadpool’s way of thinking. Performances weren’t spectacular but the actors were cast so perfectly that I don’t think it mattered very much. The film obviously struggled with a limited budget but everybody looked like they were having fun anyway so the ridiculous work-arounds were actually believable.

 

THE VERDICT: 8.5/10. I can’t wait to watch this again.

 

*All photos are lifted from the film’s IMDB page.