Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, Gina Carano, T J Miller, Ed Skrein, Brianna Hildebrand, Jed Rees
Director: Tim Miller
Embracing anger, rage and a good sense of humour, Deadpool is an entertaining movie that does just one thing, entertain. It does not give you any good advice, nor does it give you a warm feeling of being safe and protected by the superheroes. Deadpool feels like it’s parodying the superhero movie genre in the beginning, but soon devolves into crazy, slapstick and juvenile.
What keeps it going are the adult humour, muted cuss words and a simple narrative style. Director Tim Miller’s success at the ratings lies in finding identification among the newer audience, notably the audience abroad. It has been a while since I saw an English movie in a packed theatre in New Delhi, but this time it was different. The audience was not just laughing at the jokes, they were even completing the lines and there were moments of mass euphoria as if they were in a religious congregation and suddenly they had to yell, “Hail the Lord.”
The India release has an immense number of cuts and muted scenes; the censorship in India cannot just let you have the jokes about phallus, but the anti-climax for the censors is the fact that the audience is able to complete these jokes almost in chorus. This new audience has grown up watching American television series which the censors have virtually no control over. So the audience will love it.
However, if you are to watch a dubbed version of the film, I am sure you are going to have the same frustration that the dubbing artists will have had in the studios. Deadpool, as a comic character, was pretty successful, and that continues to the movies. It would not be a surprise if it becomes the biggest grosser in some time.
Deadpool puts you at ease, first by eliminating the need for you to think, and second by using a language that is outright slapstick and common. So you are not hearing sophisticated dialogues, or beautiful constructs, you are just witnessing the juvenile fantasies only packaged much better. You get to see some cool visuals, decent special effects and wonderful acrobatics; Deadpool does not even try to make you believe that there exists a greater cause for the superheroes.
Ryan Reynolds has a good voice and you get to focus on that when you don’t have to look at his face, but Ed Skrein is very handsome — if only they didn’t have to mess each other up, they could have made a pretty good-looking team. But now that Ajax is dead for good (is he?) one wonders what would be the next thing that Deadpool or Mr Wade Winston Wilson would do. Of course, you know what’s coming in the next episode if you have read the comic series, but I haven’t read them. I would rather wait for the sequel.
Deadpool is crafted well, it does not evoke those intense emotions in you and thereby keeps you at a considerable distance, I mean you don’t really want to identify with a superhero whose mutation transformed him into an unappealing person. But at the same time, you want to have a sense of humour like him. So for those who are theoretically inclined, it is a great example of how interestingly the ideas of distance and identification have been played with. For those of you who have a taste for blood and flesh oozing out of bullet holes and being splattered on screen, there are some momentary pleasures.
Ed Skrein’s character Ajax is a mystery in itself, and the moment where the innovator genius that is creating these mutated humans becomes the enemy of Wade Wilson is a loose construct. That moment in time cannot be traced with exactness, perhaps Deadpool’s narration didn’t care much about it.
The writer is founder, Lightcube Film Society
