Film Review: Deadpool (2016)

Copyright: 20th Century Fox

Deadpool is a very talkative piece. From the first moment of the film right to the very end, the main character and the actor playing him continuous talk to everything, covering other characters in the film, inanimate objects, memories, and the audience. When it comes to A-production superhero movies, this is definitely not something you experience often. Even movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, which was exceedingly self-aware compared to the old standards seems like regular superhero stuff when it is placed next to Deadpool.

The same goes for the structure of the film, which is full of flashbacks and dialogue-based sequences, pretty uncommon for the genre. In general, all of them work as a comedy which happens to include a superhero-like character and some neat fight sequences. But these are only broth to the soup that is Deadpool.

The real essence of the film is the incessant comments made by Ryan Reynolds in the role of the main character and his observations about the superhero genre and the tropes which come with it. This is where the most of the energy of the cast when in, which is basically a series of comments.

The fact that the mainstream audience is so unused to seeing anything slightly out of the ordinary is a great homage to the grinding machine that is the Hollywood industry. Here, a film with a modest budget, posing as a superhero movie, made an incredible impact both when it comes to reviews and box office success by telling jokes where they are no usually found.

On a quick glance, some might conclude that similar to Kingsman: The Secret Service it had a seditious streak, but nothing can be further from the truth. Deadpool is like a jester in the medieval court: sometimes he might poke fun at the king, but deep down inside, it wants the king to live on forever.

Films like Kick-Ass, Defendor and Super brought a bigger punch to the comic-to-film movie industry, but no one cared too much about that. It seems that we all needed Deadpool to break the fourth wall and the new age of comic book adaptation can begin with truckloads of the same old.