I’ve missed a lot of Superhero films lately, from Civil War to X-Men: Apocalypse, though I fully intend to see them all at some
point – very possibly on a plane. However, I got to go and see Deadpool in a nice comfy cinema, which
was welcome!
On the other hand, I can’t say I loved the film.
Deadpool has never been much of a favourite of mine, and he works best showing
up for a very short time before going away again. I dislike fourth
wall-breaking humour and Wade just isn’t all that interesting as a character.
But the movie was entertaining. It’s a very simple genesis
story, showing how Deadpool came to be Deadpool and then going on a quest for
revenge – with help from two very entertaining X-Men, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead who, yes, was chosen purely for her name. Big satisfying
setpieces end the beginning and end of the movie, and there’s a very ordinary
sort of background story told in flashback.
The film was perfectly decent, but I must say I
expected much more. I thought we’d be seeing a whole lot more action, more
humour and more fights. The flashback parts just took way more time than they
needed to and didn’t establish enough to make us really care for Deadpool.
There were some funny one-liners, mostly about other X-Men or referring back to
Ryan Reynolds’ other less successful forays into superhero roles, but so much
of it was just trying to be funny by swearing or being vaguely sexual. It was
very schoolboyish.
Overall, the big problem was doing too little for a
full movie. Not enough happens. Reynolds’ Deadpool was done well, more likeable
and watchable than he could so easily have been, but he just didn’t get to do
enough.
It seems there was some censorship on the Japanese
version, but given the amount of stuff that was uncensored I don’t think it can
have been anything big. The only thing I didn’t like was the reference to Basil
Fawlty being deemed incomprehensible to Japanese people so being rendered in
the Japanese subs as ‘Mr. Bean’! Now that I can’t forgive!
