Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Deadpool (2016)

Superhero landing!... Wait for it...


Deadpool is not the first R-rated superhero movie (remember Blade, Watchmen, Punisher?), but it's near perfect and it came out at the right time... There is almost nothing that I would change about this movie.

Ryan Reynolds was born to play Wade Wilson. People have been saying he would be the perfect Deadpool after his star-making turn in Van Wilder. Reynolds' career, however, had been very rough lately. After the box office failures of the Green Lantern and RIPD, no one thought Hollywood would invest in a big-budget Ryan Reynolds movie again. But Fox took a chance and put a modest $58 million budget on Deadpool. That's still a huge investment (particularly with independent-movie standards); but compared to other superhero movies, Deadpool was an underdog. If you watch just one of Ryan Reynolds' interviews, you'll hear about the struggles that film makers had before the movie was green-lit. But on the bright-side, the writers had 5-6 years to make the script as tight as possible. As I mentioned earlier, this is almost the best Deadpool movie one could make.

I just want to bring up one possible flaw with the characterization, and this is just me repeating what I heard from KindaFunny.com's Greg Miller. Before that, let me preface this by saying that I don't claim to be an expert in Marvel comics (my claim is in DC though). My limited familiarity with Deadpool was through the cartoons (namely 90's X-Men, Hulk vs. Wolverine, and Ultimate SpiderMan), as well as the infamous X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)... Ok, back to Greg Miller's point, which also makes sense to me: Deadpool breaks the fourth wall in the comics as well, but you don't know whether he is self-aware, or he is just delusional for thinking he's in a comic book. The movie, however, didn't capture the nuances of this ambiguity that comic readers experienced... But had they done that, maybe the movie wouldn't connect with the audience as well as it did.

The positives are countless: most of the jokes deliver, the action is well-choreographed, all actors are great in their roles, and that costume is phenomenal. The structure of the movie is also interesting: chronologically, it begins mid-story, does a few flashbacks to tell the origin, once you're caught up, it tells the rest of the story. The first movie I remember seeing with such a structure was Maverick (1995) - Mel Gibson's Western...

Coming back to Deadpool, I should say it was one of the most entertaining movies that I have seen recently - I had a grin on my face throughout the movie and didn't even look at my watch once. I'd give it 10/10 for entertainment value (not because it's a cinematic masterpiece).

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