This is mostly because the movie is rated MA15+. So there's blood splatter, flying heads, brain matter, some severe buttkicking... there's not quite enough Ryan Reynolds' butt, however there is some digital Deadpool wang... Or prosthetic wang. One of those.
But it doesn't feel gratuitous... not the wang specifically, but any of it... it's violent, sure, but it doesn't feel excessive, or it doesn't feel like it's lingering or glorifying the violence.
I knew a bit about Deadpool going in... Merc with the mouth, breaks the fourth wall, is sexually complicated, is one big scar, etc. And they cover most of that, although the sexually complicated is toned all the way back for a main love story with Firefly alumni Morena Baccarin (yes, yes, she's been in many, many things since, but that's still where I know her from).
But we'll just ignore the clusterfuck that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine where they totally butchered the character of Deadpool (the movie doesn't ignore it though... there are at least two major references to the previous incarnation), also brought to life by Reynolds.
To be honest I really don't know that there is anybody else who could do the character justice... Reynolds whole public persona seems to mesh so perfectly with the "superhero" who never stops cracking wise.
And the movie oozes that irreverent sensibility and sense of humour right from the first moment the credits come up stating that the director is An Overpaid Tool, the writers are The Real Heroes Here and Reynolds is God's Perfect Idiot. There's also references to A Hot Chick and A Moody Teen amongst others.
It also starts with the "test footage" that leaked online a while back and made the Internet foam at the mouth. It was a smart choice to arrange the film that way even though that part of the story should come about halfway through the movie. The sequence itself is a big fat action scene, and although I think it's in a slightly different form from the original, it's still really strong... but a lot of people have already seen that footage and putting it right at the top of the movie still allows you to use it but gets it out of the way quickly.
I didn't realise going in the this was a Fox movie, and since Fox also owns the X-Men they made multiple references to Xavier's school and even bring in second string X-Man Colossus and a character who I think they picked based on the name alone, Negasonic Teenage Warhead.
Brianna Hildebrand who plays Negasonic has the whole surly teen thing down, while Colossus is pretty much all CGI (I couldn't work out if it was a motion capture thing where someone was on set and they turned him into metal later, but I can only see a voice and a facial performance credit in the cast. Stefan Kapicic does a good job with the voice, although he makes Colossus very stereotypically Russian as opposed to previous versions.
The movie is also pretty damn funny... and all of it coming from Reynolds (and the script writer obviously)... if it's not breaking the fourth wall, it's making some sort of reference to the 80's or 90's... the best of which is the post credit sequence. I'm not going to say any more... but it's pretty much perfect.
It also manages to be an origin story without feeling overly bogged down in that formula... possibly because there's a lot of flashbacks rather than a straight linear story, so it doesn't feel like it's just an origin story, even though it is.
The villain, played by Ed Skrein, is pretty standard for an origin villain... he's essentially done Deadpool wrong and has to pay for it. But Skrein does a good line in creepily menacing, so it works better than it may have done with another actor.
But I have to say that overall the movie pretty much lived up to the hype.
yani's rating: 4 chimichangas out of 5
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