Deadpool is a crude, crass, sadistic, quick-witted, fourth-wall breaking funnyman. So why is his movie so bland?
First-time director Tim Miller has managed to take one of the most interesting, self-deprecating comic-book characters in the Marvel universe and deliver a frustratingly banal film for him to inhabit.
Miller's "Deadpool" is (surprise, surprise) a superhero's origin story. We've all see it before, right? A guy falls in love, gets sick (cancer, in this case) and decides to try a shady back-door experimentation facility to cure it. The cancer, not his love life.
The guy is Wade Wilson (played charismatically by Ryan Reynolds, who has championed this project for years), and the facility does indeed en up curing his cancer. Unfortunately, the process also severely scars his skin and gives him accelerated healing abilities in the process. This keeps him away from his girlfriend Vanessa (Morina Baccarin).
What the film really boils down to is a revenge tale. Deadpool, Wilson's adopted persona, spends the entirety of the movie trying to hunt down the man responsible for scarring him (played by Ed Skrein). Sounds like pretty standard superhero fare, right? Well, here's the catch: to understand this movie is to understand the character of Wilson, AKA Deadpool, himself. He's a guy with a wickedly dirty sense of humor. He doesn't hesitate to break the fourth wall by physically moving the camera out of the way or even drop facts about the budget of the very movie he's starring in.
This, in theory, should lend itself to a fresh, invigoratingly hard R-rated take on the superhero movie. But it doesn't at all. The movie's just stale.
\The problem with "Deadpool" lies entirely in its script and, by the end, it's apparent that the film is the subject of some kind of meta-catch-22.
Basically, as evidenced through all of Deadpool's quips on the "studio's budget" and the "obligatory CG characters," the film wants to satirize the conventions of modern-day superhero films. It wants to poke and prod at all the little story beats and archetypes that people keep going to Marvel movies for, especially because Deadpool's personality is so unlike any other superhero we've seen.
But the film ends up non-ironically executing exactly what it's trying to subvert: a run-of-the-mill, low-stakes origin story. The plot is ripe for Deadpool's signature riffing, but the writing and the jokes are not nearly strong enough to elicit that kind of insight or effectiveness. Instead, the writers (Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote the far superior "Zombieland") aim for extremely dated pop-culture references (Sinead O'Conner, Mama June) and needlessly idiotic, scatological jokes.
That being said, the film isn't without its moments: bullets, blades and body parts fly across the screen in one particularly well-choreographed action sequence. Too bad it's in the first ten minutes. It all goes downhill from there.
It's quite disappointing, actually. There are a few hilarious one-liners, some hilarious bits and one fun action sequence that all offer a glimmer of how sharp this film could have been.
But what plays out on screen isn't nearly as smart, or as witty, as Deadpool wants you to think it is.
Watch the trailer for "Deadpool" below.
Reach Staff Reporter Joe Salvato here.
Annenberg Media