You’re meant to have a blast while watching Deadpool. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is the anti-hero, he’s crass, and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. This film is laugh out loud funny all throughout, and takes shots at itself, poking fun at the cookie-cutter characteristics of superhero films. Deadpool is refreshing; it breaks the fourth wall frequently, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
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I loved this film and will be seeing it again, but some parts of it left something to be desired. While Deadpool was a very original character, the supporting characters were very standard. The love interest was your typical, a-typical character, not a follower of anyone’s rules but her own, aggressively independent and far from a “girly girl.” I have no problem with this character type, but I’ve seen it before. The only thing that struck me as an original part of the character, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), was her chemistry with Wade (Deadpool). The amount and types of sex they have is highlighted in a particularly licentious sequence which develops their relationship. She’s only important in her connection to Deadpool, and as a stand alone character she’s very weak. This is Deadpool’s movie, but that doesn’t mean that the supporting characters don’t need development past what they mean to his character.
Another character, the slow-witted but well-meaning friend of Deadpool, Weasel (T.J. Miller), had similar issues. This character was very one-dimensional. He helped Deadpool, cracked jokes & tagged along, and his most important scene without Deadpool only ushered the plot forward. I don’t like to accuse that of a film without justification. Scenes have to move plots forward, otherwise the film will never progress. Scenes that move the plot, then, must exist. My issue comes when an un or underdeveloped character carries these scenes, because then it feels like the filmmaker is just taking the easy way out, and by that I mean, creating a character whose sole purpose is to serve the main character and/or advance the events of the film. This is not just Deadpool’s sin, I’ve seen it more times than I can count, but a film goes above and beyond for me when it doesn’t use this method. An alternative would be to develop each character thoroughly so that when the plot progresses, it isn’t due to a decision or an action of a character that doesn’t do anything other than that.
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The antagonist, Ajax (Ed Skrein), is one-dimensionally evil. He didn’t have any motives, he is just bad for the sake of being bad. He and his sidekick Angel Dust (Gina Carano) create and then set out to destroy Deadpool, but of course one knows from the very beginning that they won’t succeed, since Deadpool’s the good guy, they’re the bad ones, and this is a superhero film. Deadpool faces the climactic scene with an X-Man and a new, teenage character of the Marvel Universe, both of whom seem to only be motivated by trying to get Deadpool to join the X-Men.
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The jokes and one-liners in Deadpool are mostly spot-on. The timing was appropriate and made the jokes that much funnier. The breaking of the fourth wall was also well done because it wasn’t overused and it supported the film’s image of not taking itself seriously. Occasionally, the one-liners were unfunny, but there were only a few of those, and they could still manage to draw at least a smile from most viewers.
I started this review much more positive about Deadpool than I feel I’ve written by this point. I want to make clear that I really enjoyed this film a lot. That being said, the only things that made it different from any other hero movie was the humor. Hero films (mostly) have one-dimensional antagonists and underdeveloped supporting characters, with all the focus on the main character(s). They’re entertaining, but they use movie tropes a lot, and aspects of them strike me as underdone. The camera angles and shots tend to be very standard, and the plot almost always follows the same general story arc as any other defender-of-justice production. I can be entertained by a film while still thinking it could have been done better and that parts of the story were lazily developed. What made Deadpool different was not that it stepped away from these usual characteristics, but that the main character was original and that it was a genuinely funny comedy. Overall, I would give Deadpool a 7.5/10.
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