Deadpool

Deadpool is a superhero movie for people who hate — or have grown to hate — superhero movies. As the man himself — Special Forces retiree and current mercenary Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), aka Deadpool — will be the first to tell you, he isn’t a hero. His superpowers (mutant healing abilities) are granted to him as a side effect of curing his cancer; another side effect, alas, leaves him scarred. Deadpool’s entire goal in the movie is to convince the man responsible for his powers and scars, the British snot Ajax (Ed Skrein), to undo his scars so he can get back together with his fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). Save the world? Save the city? Save the block? Nah.

Deadpool nonetheless behaves much like a superhero, in that he fights bad guys, except for the part where he kills them. While Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War agonize over metahumans taking lives, either purposely or accidentally, here comes chipper, cavorting Deadpool to separate many, many heads and limbs from their bodies when he isn’t shooting said bodies full of holes. And all so that his ex-escort girlfriend — for which occupation she is never shamed — won’t find his face repellent. In other words, Deadpool gives up the pretense even of fighting for a greater good, unlike even such a cynical antisuperhero satire as Kick-Ass. Deadpool is highly sexed, casually violent and fluently foulmouthed, and he sees no reason not to be. Perhaps not coincidentally, the movie broke many box-office records upon its February release.

Amusingly, this is tangentially an X-Men movie, as it features two members of that mutant superhero team: the stolid Russian man of steel Colossus, and a character I want to see in a spin-off movie immediately, the sullen Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), whose powers are as excessive as her name. Colossus and N.T.W. step in every so often to lend brawn to Deadpool’s mission, though even Colossus can barely stand against Ajax’s right-hand woman Angel Dust, played by Gina Carano, who seems to have resigned herself to the fact that she can’t act and attitudinizes accordingly. Anyway, few will laugh louder than I if this disreputable, R-rated red-hooded stepchild actually outgrosses the legit X-Men film opening soon.

Directed by Tim Miller, formerly a visual-effects guru, Deadpool makes the most of its peanuts-by-superhero-standards $58 million. The action is hyper-violent but sunny and weightless; it lacks the sadistic stab of the slaughter scenes in Kick-Ass. This movie, unlike Kick-Ass, isn’t trying to moralize with its violence — it’s just PlayStation shoot-the-works splatter with a sneer and a gibe. It never pretends to be “real.” On the other hand, there’s some genuine pathos in Wade’s health situation; he doesn’t want Vanessa to have to watch him die, so he absents himself from her life. She’s appropriately enraged by this. Vanessa, like the other women in the film, takes no crap, and Baccarin has perhaps never been better. Vanessa’s and Wade’s relationship is built on shared callous jokes and fierce sex; since they’re never really romanticized, they come off all the more romantic.

As for Reynolds, this is the role he was made for, and he tears into it as if to make up for the ridiculously terrible earlier version of Deadpool he played in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He’s a good and funny actor, and he doesn’t deserve to be haunted by the emerald ghost of Green Lantern for the rest of his life. Reynolds has, improbably, baked his personality into a role in which we almost never see his face. He wants to have good dirty fun and to share it with us. Deadpool is the sort of pop-culture offense all the uptight moralizers always warn you about — a hero-myth with the soul of Larry Flynt.

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