HILDEBRAND, REYNOLDS AND KAPICIC. Portray Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Deadpool and Colossus, respectively.
Ryan Reynolds should keep those wisecracks in check—or judiciously keep some of them to himself. We’ve always liked the 39-year-old actor, and have not outgrown our fanboy fascination for superheroes—but, neither DC nor Marvel seems to know how to effectively mine Reynolds’ self-deprecation and idiosyncratic sense of humor when he’s in a superhero suit.
He was a bust as Hal Jordan in 2011’s “Green Lantern” and, despite upping the blood, gore and fourth wall-smashing irreverence, he still isn’t fully effective as Wade Wilson in Tim Miller’s “Deadpool”—unless you find his flair for dismemberment and guileless guilt charming.
Reynolds is simply too loquacious for his own good—even when his character’s life is in peril! He chats incessantly even when he is semiconscious or delirious.
Before Wade goes under the life-altering knife, he manages to winkingly reference his DC comics debacle and pleads to bad boy Ajax (Ed Skrein): “Please, don’t make the superhero suit green or animated!”
That’s par for the course for the scar-ravaged comic-book character who’s known in the Marvel Universe as the “Merc(enary) with a Mouth”—a former Special Forces agent with the gift of gab and a knack for sticking up for the little people.
Cure for cancer
Like Wolverine, Wade grudgingly found his calling for crime-busting after he became the subject of a “Weapon X” experiment for which he volunteered, in the hope of finding a cure for his terminal cancer. You won’t see Cable in the film but, as Deadpool eventually discloses, you just might in its sequel.
Don’t get us wrong, the film has its disarming charms. It subverts the superhero formula by doing away with the G-rated niceties of most origins flicks. It has no qualms about showing some skin or scenes involving decapitation.
Miller wants viewers to stay attentive as his film hopscotches from present to past—and back again—to chronicle the story of how Wade got the superskills that drew the attention of Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand).
Deadpool’s rabble-rousing antics on the battlefield are flashy and crowd-pleasing enough to convince the X-Men that he’s got what it takes to join Professor Xavier’s mutant hotheads and impressionable underlings.
The film’s blood-and-gore sensibility is compelling, but this type of storytelling shtick quickly overstays its welcome—as soon as Reynolds or the production team runs out of bone-crushing gimmicks and meme-generating wisecracks!