Style over substance in Deadpool

Lets address the irony that my first post is about a Marvel movie after I panned their stuff in my blog introduction. I avoided Deadpool in theaters because of those six scary letters in front of the title, like I do with most of what Marvel puts out. If I were ever forced to get behind a comic book universe it’d be DC. But the combination of the unusually high amount of chatter around this movie and a few voices I trust talking it up led me to try it out as 33,000 feet fare.

Once in a while, when I go into a movie with a healthy skepticism, there’s a moment, early on, that's so surprising and entertaining that I immediately throw my skepticism out the window and jump on board for the duration. In Deadpool that was the opening titles, which chose to replace actual names with irreverent descriptors (“Written by the real heroes here” is the one that won me over). This is the first instance of the ballsy wit that makes the movie worth watching.

Unlike other Marvel movies that run on explosions, the dialogue is front and center here — sure there are plenty of explosions, but what we’re really waiting for is the inevitable quip hero Wade (Ryan Reynolds) is going to make immediately after. These jokes, which I’d categorize as a kind of “angry pop snap,” come every 3 to 5 seconds in the form of oddly beautiful zingers like “I’m about to do to you what Limp Bizkit did to music in the late 90’s,” and “You look like Freddie Krueger face-fucked a topographical map of Utah.” Question: how long does it take a certain kind of brain to think that joke up? Of course, the Limp Bizkit line might not play when people are watching on DVD 30 years from now, and in general the stuff borders on overwritten — when Wade refers to one villain as “less-angry Rosie O’Donnell” it’d be more natural and probably funnier if he just called her “Rosie O’Donnell.” This a judgment call and the difference is negligible but hey, as a writer I like to turn over every word.

Overall the comedy is sharp and bold enough to carry the whole thing (including one or two big laughs), which is important because there’s not much story to grab onto here — bad guy creates good guy, bad guy captures good guy’s girlfriend, good guy kills bad guy/rescues girlfriend. That being said, the story’s got some huge things going for it that a lot of movies don’t: it’s simple, and it’s clear. We’re along for the extremely violent, extremely sarcastic ride because at no point do we have to wonder what the hell is going on (*cough* Batman vs. Superman *cough*). Work in a nice little emotional thru-line about Wade’s fear of revealing his deformed face to his girlfriend and you’ve got enough ingredients for a hit movie. Which this was.

Side note: When I think of breaking the fourth wall, I think of Billy Wilder, who did it maybe most famously at the end of Sunset Boulevard. Or in The Seven-Year Itch, when someone pesters Tom Ewell about the identity of the blonde woman he’s hiding in his kitchen. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Ewell answers. “Maybe it’s Marylin Monroe.” It was. I can imagine that getting a big laugh in a 1955 theater. Deadpool loves breaking the fourth wall — a lot of the fun comes from the comic book super hero’s self-awareness that he’s a comic book super hero in a comic book super hero movie. This is fairly new ground, at least for Marvel, and a big reason the movie works. But there’s one even stranger moment. When Wade defends the importance of looks, he asks, “You think Ryan Reynolds got this far on a superior acting method?” I can imagine that getting a big laugh in a 2016 theater.