Movie review: is 'Deadpool' a refreshing take on the superhero saga?

Kavish Chetty reviews 'Deadpool' starring Ryan Reynolds as the title character

Deadpool is the prodigal son of the Marvel Universe. He's any number of things that set him apart from grizzly, over-serious counterparts like Wolverine: a one-man peanut gallery and a self-aware superhero who constantly turns to the camera and bursts through the fourth wall with a sarcastic quip, most of which have the mania of Jim Carrey in his mid-'90s glory days.

Ryan Reynolds is possibly the perfect actor to play Deadpool - as the man who first came to attention as frat-house lunatic Van Wilder, he has enough anarchic, adolescent energy to chug through two hours of dick jokes and enemies getting shish-kebab'd on the edges of his glistening katana blades.

Deadpool aims to refresh the whole superhero saga at a time when exhaustion has set in, and a near-indistinguishable slur of sequels, prequels and franchise restarts has come to define the genre. It does this by setting all the holiest conventions up to be gleefully annihilated, and its principal target is the grim seriousness of so many of these movies.

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In this way, the film has a genetic resemblance to recent superhero spoofs like Kick-Ass, Kingsman, and maybe more distantly, Superhero Movie. But under the veil of self-awareness, the orthodox superhero machine sits quietly thrumming, generating a movie that is still, in spite of its acidic humour, a straightforward cartoon caper: the origin story, the meet-cute, the side-kicks, the rugged British bad-guy who looks like a stand-in for Jason Statham, the epic battle, the happily-ever-after.

What rescues Deadpool is its focussed, one-chapter story, a nice vacation from the incessant world-building and sequel preparations going on elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, where every film feels like an isolated jigsaw piece in a never-ending empire of nostalgia.

Here, the scale is much more intimate, and we get to follow Wade Wilson, the mercenary drifter who busies himself taking one contract killing after another until he falls in love with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). As luck would have it, he is diagnosed with cancer shortly thereafter and seeks experimental treatment with Ajax (Ed Skrein), a mutant weapons expert who ends up subjecting him to weeks of torture. Wilson emerges as Deadpool. He has accelerated regenerative capabilities, but the trade-off is that the skin covering his entire body becomes bubbly and blistered, leading to many a Freddy Krueger joke.

Spider-Man was bitten by a radioactive spider, Batman watched his parents die and then inherited more money than he knew what to do with, and Deadpool gets experimented on until he emerges with mutant powers. Superheroes generally have some of the most banal origin stories, probably because most of them were conceived in the '50s when you could get away with anything, but thankfully Deadpool doesn't spend too much time lurking around the back story, and cuts straight into the action. You get cameo appearances from the X-Men Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and many moments where the film seems to slip into the cheesy romantic mode.

As far as the comedy goes, there are some pristine moments of humour that have the timeliness of a South Park episode, but in its indiscriminate targeting of everything, the film goes after burn victims and the blind and finally lets itself down as the messianic chapter that was going to redeem today's superhero dogma from its excesses.

Rating: 3/5