Deadpool:

Ryan Reynolds has, somehow, single-handedly redeemed 20th Century Fox…at least until the next X-Men movie comes out. Reader be warned: potential spoilers ahead. For those of you who have yet to find time to see Deadpool, feel free to skip to the very end of this review.

    As an avid Marvel Comics and Deadpool fan, I am happy to say that this movie met and exceeded my, admittedly lower-than-average, expectations. After their treatment of the character of Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I had lost all hope for any potential movie or series involving the character by Fox. Wade Wilson, a.k.a. Deadpool, is not a superhero by any definition of the word; if anything he is more of an anti-hero. Most importantly of all, Deadpool is commonly known by comic book fans as the Merc with a Mouth, and the Merc with a Mouth is not a child-friendly character. When Fox announced that they would be making Deadpool, there was much concern as to how they would be able to successfully capture all that Wade Wilson is in a movie with anything less than an R rating. So when it was finally revealed that Deadpool would indeed be given an R rating, many fans breathed a sigh of relief. And I am happy to confirm that Deadpool earned every second of its rating.

    The movie does an excellent job of introducing the audience to the feel of the movie with a slow-motion panning of a frozen scene of our anti-hero protagonist beating up an SUV full of smugglers as the credits introduce the main cast as “God’s Perfect Idiot”, “A Hot Chick”, “A British Villain”, “A CGI Character”, and “A Moody Teen.” Interspersed with Deadpool’s initial face-off with his arch-enemy Francis Freeman a.k.a. Ajax, viewers are also told the story of Wade Wilson through flashbacks: where he worked, how he met the love of his life and their (somewhat dysfunctional and extremely sexual) relationship, and how he became the super-not-a-hero Deadpool.

    The movie follows Wade as he copes with the discovery of his late-stage cancer by volunteering for an experimental treatment performed by a shady, underground organization that claims to be able to cure him. His cure, however, comes at the price of disfigurement across his entire body, and the movie then follows Wade as he works through the ranks of this organization in an attempt to track down Francis, who was head of the organization and told Wade that he could heal his disfigurement. In the process, the movie does not fail to take full advantage of the classic Hollywood action film cliché of the “damsel-in-distress,” by turning Wade’s fiancée into a target.

    While the story is unerringly predictable, the movie itself is fresh and inventive. The best thing about the movie is how true-to-character the movie is able to keep Wade Wilson. We see Wade regularly do the thing that he is arguably most well-known for in the comics: break the fourth wall. He directly addresses the audience out loud in a manner that has the other characters questioning who, exactly, he is talking to, and he regularly references things outside of the established movie-universe. At one point Wade requests to the people who are supposed to be healing his cancer that they not make the super-suit green, a reference to Ryan Reynolds’ previous stint in DC Comics’ Green Lantern. Later in the movie, Deadpool muses as to why we never see more than two X-Men despite the fact that the school for mutants is so large: “it’s almost like the studio couldn’t afford another X-Man,” he quips.

    Overall, if you don’t enjoy graphic violence, sex, nudity, foul language, and raunchy jokes, then Deadpool may not be the movie for you. For avid fans who enjoy all of that, Deadpool was absolutely delightful to watch; the never-ending jokes were both entertaining and honest, and the characters were immensely enjoyable (including Stan Lee’s usual Marvel movie cameo). It’s neither a superhero movie nor a comedy; Deadpool is his own genre, but if I had to pick an already established one, then I would say that, at its heart, Deadpool is an action-packed romance that is decidedly NOT child- or family-friendly.