So, I was wracking my brain to think of what Superhero movies would I be recommending people to watch now that they have time and immediately of course I thought about the whole MCU because, you know, we have time to watch them all now. But I wanted a single film I could recommend, a lot of Superhero films these days have the problem of, “Well before you watch this you need to watch that first, but you also have to watch this before you can watch that.” I just wanted one film that a new viewer could pick up and enjoy. Then I thought, Deadpool.
And why not? This is a film that was a labor of love for Ryan Reynolds. It took him eleven years to get the movie made and the amount of love he had for the project shows on screen. The film is a very faithful adaptation of the comic character, even down to the fourth wall breaking and the fact that the character knows he’s in a comic book. Having recently gone back and read some of the old Deadpool comics the characters that are in the film are all taken from the original comics which I had no idea about at the time.
Ryan Reynolds portrays Wade Wilson with such a level of ease that you forget that Ryan Reynolds isn’t Wade Wilson in real life. I think in some ways he is but in others he definitely isn’t, I mean I don’t presume to know but I don’t think Reynolds has murdered anyone before. But the mannerisms and intonation in which he delivers dialogue sounds just like how Reynolds is on chat shows and yet he feels completely in character as Wilson. It could just be that Reynolds identifies with the character so much that he has taken elements of how you would imagine they would speak and infused them into his own personality. Or Wade Wilson is just the perfect Ryan Reynolds character.
What is so great about Deadpool is that it is a comic book movie but it also feels a bit like an Indie movie at the same time. It doesn’t have the standard feel of a comic book movie, and it’s R-rated in the US (15 rated in the UK) so it’s allowed to have more colorful language, violence and a ruder sense of humor than your standard Superhero Fare. Because of this it also feels very fresh and different because Deadpool isn’t really a superhero, he’s a super-anti-hero. I would highly recommend this if you haven’t seen it and if you enjoy it there’s the sequel for you to digest as well which is just as good as the first if not better.
Deadpool is available to rent on Amazon in the US and the UK as well as other online streaming services.
Matt is a huge film and TV buff who studied film and moving image production at university. In his spare time he enjoys reading comics and books, the occasional gaming session and writing novels.