★

★

★

☆

☆

Marvel’s smart-mouthed, smut-minded, sword wielding anti-superhero Deadpool finally escapes the bowels of development hell and streaks into cinemas. Ex-special forces operative turned mercenary Wade Wilson is left with accelerated healing when a last-ditch attempt to cure his terminal cancer goes awry. Deemed by his best buddy Weasel (T.J. Miller, in his least irritating screen role to date) as ‘haunting’ in his facial disfigurement, Wilson engages a hunt for Ajax (Ed Skrein), who he believes can cure him and thereby fix his relationship with fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, sadly left behind by the latter stages of the story).





In a well-intentioned effort at reconciliation for Deadpool’s poor treatment in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds once again nabs the leading role and delivers what fans have wanted from the start: a portrayal that is true to the original comic panels. “Maximum effort” is Wilson’s whispered promise before diving into battle, a more meaningful fourth wall break than those that follow. Reynolds makes a great attempt at living up to a script that both encourages and subverts his natural charisma with boyish boisterousness. Only someone who truly wants the audience to have a ball could make the sight of our spandex-clad sicko turning baddies into human satays (cackling like a child knocking over a marble run) contagiously funny.





For the trademark humour of our titular ‘merc with the mouth’ is a crisp asset: writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick clearly have great reverence for the comic book, and the lewder elements of the Deadpool character provide the loudest of many laughs (the jabs at fellow X-Men Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead in hot pursuit). I lambasted last month’s Dirty Grandpa for an adherence to the very criteria I’m now praising Deadpool for, but there’s one crucial difference: Dan Mazer’s grubby comedy was pure filth and nothing else, whilst Miller’s ode to a Marvel latchkey has the good grace to throw a variety of quips at the wall (both decent and dirty), admirable even when they don’t quite stick.





Extensive time spent gathering dust has done its damage to the script: genre-savvy winks to and knowing stabs at the superhero genre as a whole land fairly wide of the mark. Gags aimed toward post-credit sequences and studio character ownership would appear bitingly bold had the entire internet not spent the last half-decade scratching that particular itch. Nowhere is the discord more jarring than the climactic dust up; a bombastic bout of the sort we’ve seen a hundred times before, that a much sharper film (and Deadpool himself) would happily mock a thousand times more.





Amounting to little more than a breath-freshener for the superhero genre, Deadpool is an inconsequential flash in the pan. Less Guardians of the Galaxy and more Kingsman, for better and for worse.