5 out of 5

Directed by: Tim Miller

I have no problems with Deadpool.  I am just as surprised as you are.  The trailers: did not make me laugh.  Some of the marketing material did, but in an isolated manner (like I don’t actively find this funny, but I appreciate it).  I got familiar with Deadpool through Joe Kelly but the humor never quite operated in the silly / smart strata I desired, nor did the initial Cable / Deadpool run consistently hit the highs I felt the very end of its series did.  Elsewise, Deady’s humor came across as too self-aware for my tastes, which is a common problem with “modern” humor.  Too much winking, not enough Naked Gun.  But I was impressed Deadpool was being made.  I was less impressed that they’d seemingly upped the sex and swearing ante to go for “edgy,” except that that made it R-rated, which swung back under the impressive category.  I also don’t find Ryan Reynolds’ quippy humor to be all that funny, since it pretty much only consists of coming up with funny nicknames for people, and that played heavily in the trailers.  Thus: I went into Deadpool truly just wanting to support movies like this (as in risk-taking with big name properties) to be made, but without any expectations of actually liking it.  In fact, I almost skipped going.

Would’ve been my loss.

What’s hilarious about that – and about how much I enjoyed Deadpool – is that all of my assumptions about the content still applied.  And the humor didn’t land at many, many points: the 4th-wall breaking, the excessive swearing… meh.  Wait – not meh.  Why did this work?  Because director Miller, and writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese (of the similarly smartly balanced Zombieland) found the perfect – perfect – tone and pacing to allow this nonsense to work, but did so without distancing themselves from it, per se.  This allows those that find the humor funny to legitimately enjoy those scenes, and the rest of us to enjoy the internal yin and yang of the movie those scenes establish.  And it all kicks off from the opening titles, which are already making semi-amusing 4th-wall breaking jabs (produced by “some asshats” and etcetera) before opening onto what looks like the bridge action sequence we’ve all seen in the trailers.  The magic: silly tone established, now we know Deadpool is about to bloody shoot and chop and swear… except not.  We go into a flashback.  And it’s not until we get some context for Reynolds character that we’re allowed back into the present, to start that silly.  Until another flashback.

Regularly, I would say I’m not a fan of interrupting the flow as such, but this was the perfect implementation, letting us revel in the antics of one scene – one scene, that bridge, where the movie’s present remains for the first hour – while really giving us the bulk of the story through cutaways.  Now, during these flashbacks – which track the moments leading up to the bridge and Deadpool’s origin – Reynolds humor is still in tow, as is the meta-humor, but the latter is much more clever and the former is once again balanced out by a surprising component: emotion.  The fact that I cared more about Wade Wilson’s relationship in this movie (to Morena Baccarin) and her character than in a billion more “serious” films is an incredible credit to the script’s understanding of its world as well as the actors and director working in a shit ton of nuance that just sells us on it.  Through a sex montage.  It’s ridiculous.  This shouldn’t be achievable.

By the time things catch up and we transition to the film’s final post-bridge sequence (featuring Cyclops and Negasonic Teenage Warhead) – a sequence that’s been criticized in other reviews for being slow, with which I couldn’t disagree more – I found myself actually starting to laugh at the potty and quippy humor, because the movie had adjusted my sensibilities, dosing me with reality and slipping in justifiable quantities of dumb.

There are other pluses to highlight, like how this, of all the comic book movies we’ve seen in recent years, really felt like a comic book at times for the strangest of reasons; the perhaps budget limitations that led to only two X-Men appearing was like all of the guest-star subplots that happen in mainstream books, where you can only rent the B-list characters so as not to interrupt so-and-so’s main story.  I was also incredibly amused to consider that there are really only 2 or 3 main locations, and we see them all in the trailers, and I still felt fully satisfied with every moment of the flick.

Insane.  Is it repeatable in a sequel?  Gawd, no idea.  I don’t even know how it happened the first time.  But it did, and I couldn’t be happier.  Fuckers.