MOVIE – “With great laughter comes great responsibility” – that could be the mantra of Deadpool, which is based upon the Marvel Comics anti-hero. Tim Miller’s superhero comedy is the origin story of former Special Forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson, who after being subjected to a rogue experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers (and a super-ugly mug), adopts the alter ego Deadpool. Armed with new abilities and a dark and twisted sense of humor, Deadpool hunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life. The real question is that whether the movie can be as funny as the original comic book?

 

Making a proper action or superhero comedy is actually lot harder than you might think. While the film still needs to have well-realized action sequences, it also needs to be genuinely funny. The way the action is shown must be in fact so over-the-top, that it makes a joke of itself and every action movies. Same goes for the way the hero is shown: he must be charismatic, energic and at the same time amusing and funny.

In my opinion, Deadpool made only a bit better than average job at both of those aspects.

Deadpool: both hero and villain trying (sometimes too hard) to be funny

While I am not a big fan of Deadpool, I did try the video game with the same name. Deadpool had a “hit or a missing” kind of sense of humor (at least for me) in the game, and it’s the same thing with Ryan Reynolds portraying the character.

As far as funny punchlines go, no problems here: most of what Deadpool is saying is pretty funny overall – maybe some forced, or bad jokes here and there, but only a few of them are really cringeworthy.

The problem lies in how Deadpool is represented in the movie. Since it’s an origin movie, we will learn the past of original Wade Winston Wilson, how he helps people as a mercenary and how he met… no, not your mother, but his girlfriend. The movie can’t help but making a sensible lover and good guy from this cynical mercenary even if Wade tries too hard to make fun all of it. “I am not a superhero” Wade says countless times, but because of the way the story is presented he remains a superhero. A sometimes funny, sometimes flat one, but still a superhero.

The veil of funny one-liners

And there lies the other problem with the movie as well: with all these funny jokes the movie can’t really hide, how flat and one-dimensional, the story is – it’s like an ill-fitting superhero costume. What we basically have here is your basic “get revenge and save the girl!” kind of story with extremely one-dimensional and uninteresting villains.

There are also some pretty deep plot holes in the movie or other details, which should have been better explained. While it’s an origin movie with the focus on Wade’s past, and it’s mentioned several times, that he was ex-Special Forces, we never get a glimpse about how he became such a burned-out mercenary in the first place. Deadpool also somewhat strangely attempts the tricky business of existing outside of the X-Men movie universe of commenting on it, even—while simultaneously operating within it. It’s more awkward than funny, even if Colossus, the metal-skinned Russian mutant giant was ignored so far.

Because this is another origin movie, the movie can’t help but bring up all the boring clichés we have already seen countless times. While other, better superhero parodies are happily goofing around with the story itself (Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Le Magnifique comes in my mind) Deadpool is somewhat enslaved to its own boring and clichéd origin storyline.

-BadSector-