Film Review: Deadpool (15)

Starring:  Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Ed Skrein.

Comedy-fantasy.

Of course, we’ve been here before with the 2008 Will Smith starrer Hancock, the twist being that the title character was a flawed, charmless anti-hero with little social conscience.

Deadpool aims to push that reinvention model to its limit, focusing on a distinctly-amoral, self-serving, potty-mouthed figure whose way with a wisecrack just about sees him through.

Opening with a witty credit sequence poking fun at genre conventions — those billed include “A Hot Chick”, and “A CGI character” — raises hopes, but an extended and gratuitously violent fight sequence with lashings of gunfire and endless martial arts-style scrapping quickly becomes mind-numbing.

Thankfully, the lion’s share of the film zooms in on how our “hero” came by his superpowers.

The prosaically-named Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) makes his money by fixing situations others might shirk from.

We’re introduced to him by way of a scene where he threatens a pizza delivery boy at knifepoint and warns him to give up stalking a pretty girl.

Which doesn’t sound remotely funny, but thanks to Reynolds’ charisma and the latest in a series of witty lines, somehow is.

A romantic entanglement which eludes schmaltz by being edgier and aware of the potential cliched pitfalls moves things on, Wilson being given fresh purpose by falling for Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa.

Their deepening love is played out in a montage of ever-kinkier sex scenes, which are again enlivened by the odd tasty one-liner.

But things turn darker when Wade is diagnosed with terminal cancer and agrees to an apparently no-lose deal where he can be cured, rendered immortal and given superhero powers.

It quickly transpires that what appears too good to be true is just that, sinister and amoral villain Ajax (cue jokes about cleaning products) torturing Wade in a series of disturbing ways to make his body mutate, the patient ending up hideously disfigured.

On escaping from the nightmarish lab, a barely-recognisable Wade — taking on the frankly rubbish name Deadpool — sets out to win back his true love and wreak revenge on his nemesis.

So far, so true to the genre.

But director Tim Miller (sharing comic duties as Wade’s laconic best mate) and his writing team successfully send up po-faced superhero flicks by making Deadpool gobby and wittier than his precedessors, poking fun at the X-Men series and dropping in a few comic gems.

One running gag series Deadpool repeatedly turning up for confrontations without his weapons, while an observation about Liam Neeson’s Taken films skewers the series perfectly.

Reynolds does the film’s heavy lifting and his charm just about wins you over to Deadpool despite his numerous unsavoury qualities, while Baccarin has little to do and Ed Skrein’s Ajax is a textbook humourless baddie.

With practically nothing off-limits — language, brutality and risque humour are all at the top end of the scale — it’s not surprising that not everything works.

Deadpool raises an interesting question about whether it is more sexist to hit a female attacker or to refrain due to her gender, but then wimps out of answering it, sticking to male-v-male and female-v-female fighting.

It also go too far with a couple of needless and unfunny jokes about child abuse and is hampered by a predictable ending, albeit one elevated by a couple of amusing touches.

But working on the principle that if you throw enough material at the screen, a decent amount will stick, Miller has produced a fast-moving 80-minute comedy with a satisfyingly-high laugh rate and plenty of slick fighting action if that floats your boat.

Not for the easily-offended, Deadpool more than fulfils its promise, and should have a healthy shelf life on DVD, too.