DEADPOOL: Funny or Die

Director: Tim Miller
Writers: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Stefan Kapicic
Runtime: 108 mins.
2016

I have mixed feelings about Deadpool. The character immediately gripped me when I first discovered him in high school. As a friend recently put it, "He defeated a bad guy with a thought bubble. That's the greatest."

The structure of my personality has always been particularly susceptible to metafiction. "Metafiction" is shorthand for any work of art that is within the work of art aware of itself as a work of art. Basically, it's when the characters are allowed to talk back to the reader. The way form can dominate content in metanarrative has great appeal to folks with a structure-heavy mindset. Deadpool was one of my first exposures to blatant metafiction, and it was revelatory. The character was actively recognizing the formal context in which he was placed! He was bringing subtext to the level of text! He was making jokes about the audience's relation to fictionalized characters! It struck me as smart and very, very funny.

After digging into metafiction for my college English thesis, I've come to realize that the most important part of metafiction is not how clever or creative it is, but how well it is able to ground itself in real emotional truth. Vulnerability is the key to any meaningful narrative, and metafiction more than other genres can easily be too clever for its own good. By constantly referencing itself, a story can get caught up in irony to the point that it ceases to say anything more than "Look at how smart I am!"

Please.

Please look at how smart I am.


Characters like Deadpool started to trouble me, and as soon as you get some distance from the cleverness of the conceit, you begin to see all the ugly scapegoating, racism, and misogyny that can seep into a story when "self-awareness" is bandied about like a Get out of Jail Free card.

All this is why I was trepidatious walking into Deadpool. The odds that such a hit or miss property could be successfully churned through the studio system seemed somewhat low. Yet despite all the adversity it faced, or perhaps because of it, Deadpool manages to be one of the best versions of itself in many of the ways that count.

The story is that of Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), perennially messed up do-badder. He hangs out at a bar with his people: tough folks who take money to mess up those who prey upon the less fortunate. It's there that he meets the love of his life, a prostitute named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). They proceed to have a torrid and loving sex life in a montage that makes full use of the "rated R superhero movie" conceit. But Wade gets cancer. A shady organization run by the smarmy Ajax (Ed Skrein) pursues Wilson and convinces him that not only can they cure him, but they can turn him into a superhero to boot. Instead, they subject him to a torturous process that scars his body irrevocably, but also gives him regenerative powers and a healthy dose of crazy. This is the birth of not only his superhero persona, but his ability to access his own metanarrative (though this is a bit convoluted as Wade was already making (slightly less?) meta-jokes before the procedure).

Thus an anti-hero is born. Deadpool is, after all, far from heroic. He slaughters people with reckless abandon (usually bad guys of course). The film makes gestures towards the questionable morality of its protagonist's proceedings, going so far as to thematize the way past trauma translates into a skewed moral compass. Colossus even spends the entire movie trying to get Deadpool to join the X-Men, although as the body count stacks up this gesture begins to make less and less sense. I appreciate the presence of the commentary, but it only really goes halfway--after all, this is a movie that wants to thoughtlessly revel in its R rating on occasion, and one can't fault it for that.

I don't think it would be off base to suggest that the reason audiences are able to get behind this snarky psychopath boils down to the efforts of Ryan Reynolds. Ever since he played a botched version of the character in the 2009 egg X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds has been campaigning hard for a full on cinematic realization of Deadpool. God only knows why he picked this particular character as his passion project, but it is an undeniably good fit. Perhaps he felt the need to let loose his comic weirdness after being churned through the romcom grinder for years. At any rate, Deadpool has been a long time coming thanks to the tireless efforts of Reynolds.*

*Not to minimize the also tireless efforts of writers Reese and Wernick, but Reynolds was the most prominent of Deadpool's advocates.

Reynolds breathed life into the project offscreen, but he's no less crucial onscreen. His physical clowning in the suit is top notch, and I'll never be able to imagine another voice for the character again. Reynolds has a cheeky lilt to his delivery that allows even the worst jokes to slip past you like they're not a big deal. Reynolds also does amazing work with his eyes. Whenever the mask is off, in flashbacks or otherwise, Reynolds lends a kind of puppy dog vulnerability to a character who would otherwise have been insufferable. Thus Deadpool avoids a great many of the pitfalls of irony in metafiction by imbuing the character with a faint whiff of tragedy, while also acknowledging that to get bogged down in moroseness would ruin the whole point of the project.

It's a tricky balancing act, one that the film hits slightly more than it misses. The overpass action sequence that dominates nearly half of the script is the prime example of Deadpool firing on all cylinders. The time-jumping structure works well enough, and the sense of fun is palpable. This sequence even manages to surmount the ever-present question of how to establish stakes when your protagonist is functionally invincible. In this case, Deadpool has forgotten his ammunition, and needs to count down every round to make sure he has enough for all the bad guys. It's the highlight of the movie.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film remains enjoyable, but feels pretty shabby next to its finest moments. The only other protracted action sequence in the film, the climactic face-off with Ajax, pales in comparison to the inventiveness of the opener. The question of how to raise stakes despite Deadpool's invulnerability once again rears its head, and the climax answers it in the laziest and most common way: it damsels somebody the hero cares about. In fact, two women are damseled over the course of the final scene: Deadpool's girlfriend Vanessa and the X-Men trainee Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). The movie makes a few flaccid gestures toward the notion that "hey, these ladies can handle themselves!" but the damage is done. Between the damseling, the straightforward choreography of the action, the CGI destruction, and the unconvincing villain, Deadpool's climax has reverted to the status quo of mediocre superhero movie structure that it aggressively promised us it would avoid. That final sequence doesn't seem far removed from something you might have seen in Wolverine, a movie that Deadpool correctly skewers every chance it gets.

I also could have done without a great deal of the flashbacks. None of it is outright bad, except perhaps for a montage of Wilson being tortured that seems to be included in its entirety for no reason beyond showcasing the R rating. None of it is great either, though (except perhaps for the other montage). Beginning the movie in media res was the right idea, but it also made me wonder why exactly we were returning to the well of Wilson's past with so much frequency--especially considering Wilson isn't all that different from Deadpool, other than Deadpool's weird, undeveloped insecurity that Vanessa won't want to bang him because he's ugly now.

I enjoyed Negasonic Teenage Warhead, but most of the other side characters were only passingly entertaining. Colossus is an unfortunate failure, a walking cartoon that only hangs around to ineffectually say the same thing to Deadpool over and over again in a goofy Russian accent. Much of Deadpool's world feels strangely empty, a fact that the movie references when Deadpool wonders why he only ever sees those two X-Men. This is clearly a budgetary constraint, one that is blessedly ameliorated by Tom Holkenborg's top notch soundtrack. It fills the world out as much as it can, and lines right up with the personality the movie is going for.

Overall, I don't believe Deadpool is as subversive as it thinks it is--for every top notch meta-joke (the climactic unmasking), there is a purely puerile one (prom sex). But it is subversive enough. The superhero genre is well-worn at this point, yet studios are still loathe to take chances, as evidenced by Fox's by-the-numbers crapfest Fantastic Four. Deadpool stood up and thumbed its nose at a system that cranks out countless identical movies. Deadpool is identical to nothing, and for that it deserves a whole lot of credit. That being said, Deadpool doesn't escape its identity as a facile power fantasy in keeping with its superhero kin. In fact, Deadpool is almost certainly a more powerful power fantasy for a select demographic of people. He is, after all, a man who gets superpowers after being heinously mistreated by both the universe and the culture around him, a man who uses this trauma as an excuse to do whatever he wants, a man who hides all culpability behind a snarky sense of humor, a man who makes jokes about minorities that are coated in protective layers of self-awareness, a man who is so cool that he uses both guns and swords, and a man who gets the girl in the end despite having a disfigurement that looks not unlike... horrible acne.

Deadpool could have been better, but like I said, Deadpool could have been a whole lot worse.

3 / 5  BLOBS

P.S. It's worth noting that Deadpool has had one of the most comprehensive and effective advertising campaigns I've ever seen for a movie. In addition to the traditional avenues (TV spots, etc.) Deadpool has taken advantage of both old (billboards) and new (reddit) mediums for advertisement. The viral stuff has been clever and plentiful. And it's paid off--Deadpool has broken all sorts of records like highest February opening weekend, highest Fox-produced opening weekend, and highest rated R opening weekend of all time. The runt of the litter has suddenly become the brunt of the litter, and the blockbuster landscape will change because of it.