Ryan Reynolds is Deadpool…
Again.
He’s the Merc with the Mouth, a hired goon turned immoral mutant hitman. It’s not the first time Ryan Reynolds has played this role…. and we’re not going to talk about that first time either.
You were there. You know what went down.
After finding the girl of his dreams, Wade Wilson discovers that he’s dying of cancer and, desperate to save himself for the woman he loves, undergoes some pretty horrible experiments to activate his mutant genes… making him invulnerable, but also making him look like the inside of other people’s rectums. Now reduced to letting his girl think he’s dead, Wilson becomes Deadpool on a quest for revenge that gets personal when the very same jerk that made him a freak steals away his woman.
Also, Colossus is there..
All right, first of all, yes… it really is that good. Deadpool manages to tell an origin story that doesn’t feel like a tired retread of stuff we already know all while telling a parallel story that (shock and surprise) actually has the superhero in a superhero costume doing superhero things. I know that seems like a given in a superhero movie, but most superhero movies focus too much on the civilian and not enough on the superhero. Looking at you, Green Lantern.
Actually… don’t look at Green Lantern either.
I feel like I’m not going to do you fine folk reading this review a service by extolling endlessly about how funny and action packed this movie is or how Ryan Reynolds is the perfect choice to play Deadpool because everyone else is already raving about those things everywhere else.
So, I’m going to approach it from a different angle.
This is the first time I’ve ever believed a love story in a superhero movie.
I know, right? Go figure… Deadpool brings us the first believable superhero romance.
I never bought the romances in the Batman movies, Lois Lane and Superman always felt like they were going through the motions in their silly little fights, and Carol and Hal… No, I said I wasn’t going to mention that movie.
With Deadpool, the love is in the air and drying into a hard to clean crust.
It’s romantic as a movie about two mentally damaged people can be but, you know… it really went a long way to making this movie work because, at the end of the day, I actually cared about Wade and Vanessa because I believed in them. I believed in their love and the bond that they shared and the fact that it was so crass at its core made it a type of romance that I really had never seen before. It was new and I liked it. The romantic angle drove the story and wasn’t just a useless plot thread to put a hot woman in the movie.
That, my friends, is really the thing: Deadpool isn’t just a gloriously dirty romp through the seedy underbelly of the cinematic X-Men but not Marvel Cinematic Universe… at its core, Deadpool is the very definition of a good extremely well-made movie. No wasted scenes, no superfluous nonsense, very few of the jokes fell flat, there were no cringe-worthy supporting characters, no unnecessarily complicated and convoluted plot… it tells a simple story and tells it very well. You’ve got to respect that because it seems like it’s a lost art form some days.
Amazingly, the movie wasn’t even mean-spirited as dirty comedies often get. Through it all, there was a… I really have no other word for it other than “warmth” that allowed us to laugh at the absurdity of the situations both on and off screen without making us feel dirty for doing it. Most of the time, this type of low-brow shock-value humor is a slap to the face. Deadpool is more of a firm goose and a good-natured slap on the back.
Deadpool is a movie made by talented people who know how to put a movie together and love and respect the characters it’s about. It’s not afraid to allow Deadpool to speak to the camera and repeatedly break the fourth wall, it’s not afraid to actually have a superhero in costume for the majority of the run, and it’s not afraid to play in the universe it’s set in while making fun of the universe it’s set in. It also resists the siren-like urge to cram as many characters into the story as possible and you’ve got to respect that.
From the opening credits (which are, quite frankly, some of the most wonderful and beautiful credits I have ever seen) to the final after-credits scene, this is a comic book movie that is proud… darn proud to be a comic book movie. It’s fun… it’s so darn much fun. I laughed heartily so much so that I missed jokes and dialogue and will probably have to gladly see it again.
Deadpool easily… and I do mean easily falls somewhere in the top ten best superhero movies of all time. Deadpool is so good, it almost looks like it was made effortlessly and shames all of the other movies that can’t do what its done.
I loved every engrossing, disgusting, blood-soaked minute of this masterpiece and I can’t wait for more.
Jason Gaston 