Deadpool (2016)

Deadpool is not your grandfather's comic book movie. For that matter, it's not your father's comic book movie. In fact, I'm not entirely sure who's comic book movie this is. It's raunchy, gorey, hyper-violent, foul-mouthed,outrageous, hilarious and quite possibly the most fun comic book movie since the 1966 Batman! It is quite possibly the most R-Rated movie I've watched since Pulp Fiction. In short, I loved every bawdy, over the top moment of it. I will warn, the rest of this review may not exactly be Safe For Work.

You know you're in for something different when the opening credits read "some douchebag's film", "produced by asshats", and "directed by an overpaid tool". The movie concerns Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds, "God's Perfect Idiot"), an ex-Special Forces operative turned mercenary. He meets and falls for a hooker named Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, "a hot chick"). When he finds out he's dying of cancer, Ajax (Ed Skrein, "a British Villain") offers him a chance to be part of an experiment that will cure his cancer. The experiment, in a vile and disgusting secret base, ends up giving him regenerative powers but makes him look like "an avocado had sex with an older, disgusting avocado". Wilson takes on the moniker of Deadpool and goes out for bloody revenge. Along the way Colossus (Stefan Kapicic, "A CGI Character") tries to make him give up his murderous ways and join the X-Men, something Deadpool consistently flips off.

Ryan Reynolds played Wilson for the first time in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That movie is mostly okay, but the character of Deadpool was completely wasted. Especially since they decided to sew his mouth shut, eliminating one of the character's biggest traits, his non-stop wisecracking. Reynolds loved the character enough to keep pushing to get his own movie. Reynolds is hysterically funny in this, cracking wise, drawing childish pictures of the villain, and generally breaking the fourth wall again and again. Actually, this movie doesn't so much as break the fourth wall as it burns it down, scatters the ashes all over the place and farts in it's general direction for good measure. There is literally a fourth wall break inside a fourth wall break in this movie, something not even Groucho Marx ever did.

The rest of the cast somehow manages to keep up Reynolds. I'm not sure how they do it, but they do it. While Baccarin is ultimately reduced to Damsel in Distress, her early scenes with Reynolds are touching and funny, as is the scene where she unmasks him at the end. Skrein's Ajax, real name Francis (a fact Deadpool loves reminding him of) is appropriately nasty. His henchwoman Angel Dust (Gina Carano) as is gorgeous as she is deadly. She gives Colossus a good run for his money in the fight department at the end. Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead is the one character, however, most equipped to meet Deadpool on equal terms. Their back and forth is an absolute highlight of the film.

I would say that this tops the earlier Wolverine movie, but there's really no comparison. They're two movies on completely different levels of filmmaking, which is weird since they sort of inhabit the same shared universe. Deadpool is clearly supposed to be part of Fox's X-Men Universe. Besides Colossus, there are several scene at Professor Xavier's School. Mercifully, you don't need to have seen any of the other movies to enjoy this one nor do you need to see this one to enjoy the other movies. It stands on its own gloriously and wonderfully. And at under 2 hours, it isn't as bloated as other superhero movies so it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

Good thing, too. Although if you did need to see X-Men to enjoy this or vice versa, there would be a lot of disappointed children since there is no way any child should see this. There were reports of parents taking their children to see this and being outraged by the content. To them I say: "Hi. There's this little thing known as the internet. Maybe you heard of it? Lets you check out the content of movies before seeing them? Yeah, maybe you should look into that in the future." For the rest of us, however, this is one wild trip.