what a (very good) Deadpool movie needed to be

Rating: 8/10 (11 February 2016)

As I left the theater I told my wife, 'you know, Deadpool is kind of like the Muppets of comic book-superhero movies'. It wasn't the wisest comparison (maybe filthy f***ing Bugs Bunny is far more accurate, but I digress), in large part since the Muppets are family entertainment with an edge that can appeal to adults and yet still be good fun for kids, while Deadpool is hard-R action carnage with sometimes (ok, a good lot of the time) lines that will make many, many, many teenagers laugh (and some folks who get a few key references to things outside of this decade). I think I was just responding to the total irreverence of the whole thing, not to mention the constant breaking of the fourth wall - it's not something completely groundbreaking on its own (Spider-Man talks to the audience, for example), but here it's aware of many of the faults that have come up on comic book and super-hero movies, including its own franchise. For me one of the most cathartic moments of this or any recent movie is seeing a short but noticeable image of an action figure of Deadpool from the 2009 Wolverine movie. Which sucked.
Why it did is for reasons outside of the 'not getting the character' right thing (though that's part of it), but suffice it to say what director Tim Miller (first timer! impressive that) and the writers (previously of the also super-self-conscious/meta Zombieland), needed to do was to take the p*** out of the genre while also delivering a story that had some heart to it... wait, heart, in a movie that has the "Merc with the Mouth" Wade Wilson,, the guy who goes through Weapon-X-program-stuff and comes out with the skin of insert-TJ-Miller-Joke-Here appearance? Sure, why not? If I can take it back to the Muppets one last time those movies had heart to them underneath as well. With this Deadpool movie, there's only a couple of scenes where there's no sarcastic lines or quips or just outright 'I'll talk s*** till the cows come home' stuff, but they do help to give the movie some grounding and keep things moving along well.
When I say it's hard-R, I mean it - if you take your kids, make sure they know what they're in for and that despite the appearance of the Xavier School, this is very violent and bloody and with limbs flying and heads rolling and little tiny hands regenerating and... too much said. But for me, at least in the first half of the movie before it got to the climax (which I'll get to in a moment), it was refreshing to see how violent it got. I'm not completely sure if it was Miller and the filmmaers' intentions but I suspected all of bodies laid to waste in sometimes horrifying ways is some kind of comment on how bloodless many of the comic book movies and other X-Men films can get. Sure people die and get stabbed by Wolverine and so on, but there's no consequences. Deadpool is the kind of movie where Colossus (that one big Russian metal guy who was in the other X-Men movie that I don't remember the name of) tries to tell Wade not to hurt any people on a highway where a big gun-sword-battle has happened, Wade says nobody got hurt... and then a guy just falls from up above in the background from his wounds. Oops.
It's a big comic spectacle that works better as a comedy, and somewhat as a love story, than as an action film. I say this despite a relatively coolly shot and choreographed opening sequence on a highway - which gets sort of cut back to in time during Wade's introduction in flashback - since when it gets back the fights and stunt work later on, the big climax included, it's just acceptable. The real skill of Miller and his team is in letting Ryan Reynolds take this character where it needs to, which is being a constant talking-s*** badass; by the time it comes down to Deadpool facing down the man who made him who he is, "Ajax", the tension isn't fully there just for the reason that Wilson has the ability to regenerate from his injuries (it's one of those they-worked-on-him sort of things).
But what's further surprising is that the romantic side of the story works more than I expected thanks to a wonderful set up between Reynolds and Monica Baccarin as Vanessa. They trade barbs in such a way that you wonder if they'll run out of steam; some of their lines are crude, a lot of them very nasty and sex-related, and yet that made it endearing to me when things do get serious between them (the conflict of course that Wilson gets cancer, and all his troubles flow from there). If these actors didn't have good timing and chemistry it would falter, but they don't and so it doesn't, and by the time that the characters get reunited near the end the same spark is still there as are the real levels of sorrow about why they've been apart and what's kept it that way (some of it is Wilson's own doing, the sort of 'look a way I'm a hideous beast' cliché, which I forget if it's even a cliché).
Could it have been less low-brow? Maybe. But it's smart enough to be exactly the kind of self-reflexive comic book movie that goes after all of the bulls*** with these movies, from the budgets to Jackman and beyond, and makes its own identity. I found it a lot of fun.