Deadpool

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!