Official Synopsis
Hold onto your chimichangas, folks. From the studio that brought you all 3 Taken films comes DEADPOOL, the block-busting, fourth-wall-breaking masterpiece about Marvel Comics’ sexiest anti-hero: me! Go deep inside (I love that) my origin story…typical stuff…rogue experiment, accelerated healing powers, horrible disfigurement, red spandex, imminent revenge. Directed by overpaid tool Tim Miller, and starring God’s perfect idiot Ryan Reynolds, Ed Skrein, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller and Gina Carano,DEADPOOL is a giddy slice of awesomeness packed with more twists than my enemies’ intestines and more action than prom night. Amazeballs!
Deadpool is like eating that ice cream that you craved. It’s as delicious as you imagined it might be, but at the same time it’s over much too quickly. Afterwards, you feel dirty for having eaten the ice cream, but know at some given point you’re going to be back for more.
This analogy is far better than my virginity analogy, so be thankful you got draft three of this review.
Led by the passion of funny man Ryan Reynolds, who hopes to make amends to his last Deadpool outing, which was the least of X-Men Origins: Wolverine’s problems, Reynolds takes the character by the same name and transforms him from comic book pages to onscreen persona flawlessly. Foul-mouthed and dirtier than a college kid during Woodstock 94’.s Reynold’s second go around of Deadpool delivers from beginning to end. Of course, the star may have helped propel the persona, and he did that in spectacular fashion, but he had help from director Tim Miller and star writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who put together a small budget movie, yet made the world bigger than it seemed. It takes quite a bit of talent to make the latter happen.
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Anyway, let’s get on with the review, shall we?
Act one develops Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) from crusading mercenary scaring the crap out of potential stalkers to unlikely hero who is horribly disfigured thanks to wanting to live from a bad bout of cancer…everywhere. The first act spends a large amount of time giving Wilson a proper development. Credit writers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and director Tim Miller for spending a great deal of time explaining Wilson’s motivation that lead him up to the character of Deadpool. Most of the motivation is explained through Wilson’s relationship with his ex-hooker turned girlfriend, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). It takes that relationship, let’s it play out with some very raunchy scenes (it builds the relationship quickly) and then dives into his unfortunate, though never truly explained, cancer. The big C ends up crumbling the strong relationship between the two sex-crazed lovers. It gives a healthy dose of balance to the story and sets up Deadpool’s introduction beautifully.
Now, if you haven’t seen the film, then prepare yourself, it doesn’t do this seamlessly. Act one cleverly cuts between present day Deadpool and Wade Wilson’s past that led up to that present moment. It starts off with Deadpool hunting down antagonist Ajax (Ed Skrein), or at least a gaggle of his men, in a spectacular highway battle, that doesn’t end well for the bad guys. It’s woven together with fourth wall breaks that act as dividers between past and present time periods. This editing keeps a solid flow of ‘back and forth’ between past and present. This also makes the world/story seem a lot larger than it actually was, though we’ll get into that a bit later as this review wraps up.
As act one starts concluding, you’re given a large dose of how Wilson was tortured by antagonist Ajax during Wilson’s mutant transformation process that led to his eventual change into Deadpool. It’s painful to watch, but provides a hell of a lot of ammunition/motivation for the audience to see Ajax get what he deserves by the end of the film.
Again, act one is solid and adds the much needed depth to Reynold’s Wade Wilson than the Wolverine abomination could never achieve.
Act two begins with Deadpool systematically hunting down associates of Ajax in hopes of finding him. It’s a series of montage kills that are led by humor with violence being the chaser (drinking reference, kids).Act two is driven by a series of quick murders that eventually drives Ajax out of hiding, but also into kidnapping Wilson’s saddened widow, Vanessa. It also pushes Deadpool into an enraged sense of revenge, which is a beautifully way to spiral into act three. As the second act starts pushing towards the third act, you fully understand that whatever happens at the end, it’s probably going to be epic in scale.
And you would not be wrong.
Act three kicks the entire film into fifth gear. The stakes are raised, the situation becomes gritty and brutal and if that wasn’t enough, a couple of X-Men show up to back up Deadpool, Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). The film concludes in brutal, bloody, yet humorous Deadpool fashion, though I’m not giving too much away (you have to see it yourself). It most certainly will satisfy fans, as well as set a new over-to-the-far-side-of-the-tracks bar on how a comic book movie should be made.
With all this said, is there anything that one can criticize about the film? If I look back on it now, I can see how incredibly low budget and small this film session truly was for cast and crew. You have a bunch of scenes for Wade Wilson’s backstory, but essentially just two to three more huge scenes for the rest of the movie (bridge, carrier and murder montage). There wasn’t a lot to it and for anyone in production, you can sense this a bit. In short, there should have been a bit more depth to the production, so it didn’t feel so constrained. Maybe more heroes could have crossed over, maybe a nice scene with Wolverine, but the movie never makes room for much more than what is included in the above description.
Having said that, while I wish there was more, I’m not sure there needed to be more. It works, I mean it works well. The movie feels big because of the editing, it sounds big because of the incredible writing and it visually looks big because Tim Miller did a helluva directing job and stuck with a production plan until the end. Seriously, bravo to everyone involved because you can see the passion everyone had for the movie, as well as the character, from beginning to end.
Anyway, Deadpool is a delight and just a fun adventure from start to finish. It’s every bit of rated R, so beware parents who have Captain America stuck in their brains as a blueprint for all comic book films. If you can live with the rating, you’ll appreciate the art that comes with it.
Definitely one to own.
On the special features side of the tracks, there’s a lot to be happy about. You get some well-deserved, yet still interesting deleted/extended scenes. You get an awkwardly funny gag reel, some great commentary and a few other items of interest to keep the giggles going. Here’s a full list of what to expect:
– Deleted/Extended Scenes (with commentary from Tim Miller)
– Deadpool’s Fun Sack (enjoy that one)
– Gag Reel
– From Comics to Screen…to Screen
– Commentary from Ryan Reynolds and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
– Commentary with Tim Miller and Rob Liefeld
Onto the summary!
