Fun, bloody and funny - could be the Marvel film of the year!

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2018)

'Deadpool' is this year's 'Guardians of the Galaxy' - a non-mainstream Marvel film with offbeat humour that's really well made. And the soundtrack's good, but not as excellent as the aforementioned film. Deadpool's story is a simple one, really - mostly because it's pretty much identical to Wolverine's origin story: ex-soldier thinks he's not a hero, even though he helps others, gets experimented on and turned into a freak, tries to win back his loved one. That being said - this is much better than 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine', and even 'The Wolverine'. Still, there's a few throwbacks to the former, which featured Reynolds as a non-masked Deadpool, and a few nice winks to Hugh Jackman.
The film starts excellently, with a fantastic super slow-motion shot, and has the funniest titles sequence I think I've ever seen. The film then does a good job of flashing back to fill us in on how Wade Wilson (Reynolds) became Deadpool - helped by some appropriate fourth-wall breaking. We're introduced to Vanessa (Baccarin - who looks a lot like Famke Janssen from the original 'X-Men'), the love of his life, and Weasel (Miller) his best friend. They both play good supporting parts, particularly some of Miller's lines which are dryly hilarious. It's also good to see Marvel try to take back some of their X-Men characters from Fox (which is acknowledged with tongue in cheek), with Colossus (Kapicic) being portrayed excellently - a naive Russian with a pure heart, trying to get Deadpool to join the X-Men. He's helped by the new character, Negasonic (Hildebrand) - and the taxi-driver (Soni) in two great scenes.
The bad guys, Francis (Skrein) & Angel (Carano), are adequate and move the plot along. The ending's good and I hope they make more, because the fight scenes are done excellently, the humour and jokes are 100% adult-only and totally fitting. Reynolds nails it as the 'Merc with a mouth', with great timing and nuance from under his mask, and he does a great job of not being the pretty-boy when needed. This film makes me hope they get around to doing a Gambit film at some stage - and I'm now interested to see how 'Doctor Strange' turns out later in the year...