There is something refreshing about watching a superhero movie that finds the hero on the receiving end of…well ‘pegging’ I understand is the technical term. For all the marketing behind Deadpool’s originality as a superhero movie, it’s best moment results as much from the butt-fucking as it does from the hero-work and action sequences. I doubt I’ll ever write that about Marvel/Disney movie.
Any Deadpool review will be considered incomplete without a reference to the fact that Ryan Reynolds takes a strap-on in the ass. That this scene exists is a testament to the creators of Deadpool and to Fox for letting them run with the R rating. It’s not quite as controversial as it may have seemed in development (strap-ons were all the rage in 2015), but its inclusion in a major superhero release from a major studio is notable. And seeing a just-about-movie-star like Reynolds on the receiving side is likewise a pleasant surprise.
On the whole, that scene is probably the most notable moment in Deadpool, a movie completely smitten by its own whimsy and ingenuity. Watching it is like like watching a snake eats its own tail: unfolding a plot that is mocked in the voice-over, only to use the voice-over as an attempt to get audiences to care about the thinnest of plots which only minutes ago was being mocked by Deadpool.
Part of the smugness of Deadpool comes from the conviction that audiences have not seen a movie quite like it before. Perhaps that is true of the fourth-wall breaking superhero. That gimmick is used to make decent meta-jokes (criticizing the movie studio, for example, because they couldn’t afford better X-Men), but on the whole serves to confuse the film’s tone and characters: at one point Deadpool is criticizing the movie’s creation, in another he’s mocking a blind woman’s coke habit. Both are funny enough jokes, but put them together and the movie doesn’t make sense. I love a crazy movie with a crazy structure (Deadpool has both), but I do like my movies to have at least a modicum of internal logic.
Even if you completely throw logic out, such self-deprecation adds very little to Deadpool‘s most successful element: the love story.
The central romantic relationship between Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, (Ryan Reynolds) and Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, who is very good when she gets to cut loose a little) is generic, yes, but it finds real humor and sweetness in the overtly down-and-dirty interactions of the couple. Before Wade Wilson becomes Deadpool through {necessary boring origin story}, Wilson is working as a bruiser for hire. We see him helping a young woman get rid of her stalker, proving he is an unhinged badass with a soft spot. Wade meets Vanessa at a bar for hitmen (bartended by TJ Miller, who is funny and crass as one expects). .
Wilson is an obnoxious, smug asshole; Vanessa a prostitute with a pension for pop culture cracks and bondage. The two have a debate about who was more brutally abused as a child, and before you know it, smoochies (and then some).
Their love is doomed, of course, because {necessary boring origin story}, and soon Wade Wilson is wearing a red suit, saying stupid things like “wheezing bag of dick tits,” and farting in old ladies faces. Is that stuff funny? Kind of, I guess. But the problem for Deadpool is that Deadpool’s continual overbearing sense of humor is not nearly as endearing or original as the film thinks it is. He’s actually very familiar. If you’re over 30.
If anything surprised in Deadpool, it is how overtly the movie dons the action make-up of the 1990s. You couldn’t walk through a Mr. Movies in 1994 without hitting a dozen VHS tapes that featured heroes like Deadpool: a rough around the edges bad boy with a heart of gold, sticking up for the little guy while indiscriminately murdering dozens of anonymous “bad guys.” Every time that Deadpool shot some black-suited gun wielding un-named extra, my boredom increased. Which is problem because Deadpool kills a lot of anonymous un-named baddies in this movie.
One could argue that this humor and violence are coded in the DNA of Deadpool, both in this film and in the comics that brought forth the character. I mean, Deadpool knows that he is a murder (“technically, this is murder” he says in one aside, as he executes a man). He also mocks political correctness (in one of the movie’s best jokes, he asks a young woman in a fight if it’s more sexist to punch her or not to punch her because “the line is confusing and blurry”) and embraces killing as comedy (“Death by zamboni!”).
Again, lots of this stuff is funny, but Deadpool just doesn’t know where to go with its multi-tracked comedy. Director Tim Miller manages all the jokes individually, but he can’t quite reign in the comic romance, with the comic love-story, with the comic voice-over, with the meta-comic movie industry criticism.
Which means, at the end of the day, Deadpool is little more than a 1990s obsessed action-comedy, complete with a Salt N’ Pepa soundtrack, Sinead O’Connor bald-girl jokes, and at least a baker’s dozen slow-motion flipping-hero kill-shots.
Even the intersting stuff in Deadpool, like the non-traditional hetero portrait of sex, is put to 1990s use, as Wade Wilson threatens one of his targets with gay sexual advances. Nothing spices up your superhero movie like some good ol’ fashion gay panic.
Leave a Reply