Hollywood has pillaged the Marvel Universe to an extraordinary degree – three Spider-mans plus two more in a rebooted franchise, two Hulks, two Avengers, two awful Fantastic Fours and a plethora of X-Mens complete with Wolverine spin-offs to name a few – and they all detail the hard life of a mutant outsider tasked with saving the planet.
Marvel (and Fox, who made the X-Men films and this) are aware of the repetition.
They took a lighter turn with Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man. Now, they’ve taken it a step further.
They’ve gone completely meta, and become self-referential. They’ve made Deadpool.
This is a film which is at times tongue-in-cheek, and at times, utterly blatant in its hyper self-aware satire.
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An abrasive, hyper sexual mercenary by the name of Wade Wilson meets and falls for an abrasive, hyper sexual woman by the name of Vanessa.
They fall in love, Wade contracts terminal cancer, and in an effort to save himself, undergoes horrific treatments which turn him into a mutant.
He is disfigured in the process, thereby setting up his desire for revenge, but putting Vanessa in harm’s way.
This over-arching story is diced into segments, punctuated with quite exceptionally brutal violence and wilfully ludicrous one-liners.
With about as much subtlety as can be expected of a foul-mouthed, hyper-violent ninja clad in blood red, the film immediately punches the audience in the gut with its send-up style.
Within the first act of the film, several real-life stars, famous characters, and the entire comic book movie genre are mentioned, sometimes, with Reynold’s Deadpool talking straight to camera.
Now, mix this with more dick jokes than an American college movie, and you’d be forgiven for expecting a crass, vulgar film with very little depth. That is exactly what unfolds. And it works.
Every other character with the exception of the damsel and the villain, is comic filler, but Deadpool himself, is mad, bad and dangerous to know, injected with that irascible cheeky charm that made Reynolds so popular in the first place.
To those who love Marvel movies and Van Wilder: Party Liaison, you will have already made up your mind to buy a ticket.
For the rest of you, it is worth a watch just for the sheer energy with which it is told and the lightness with which it demands to be treated. Keep an eye out for the now famous, post-credits extra Marvel scene too.
Deadpool (15) is out February 10.
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