Deadpool

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Deadpool introduces Wade Wilson halfway through a bloody ambush, then lets him interrupt the action to explain how he arrived there. That arrangement is a good guide to the whole film: Wade knows an audience is watching, and he would rather entertain it than behave like a dignified superhero. Before the red suit, he is a mercenary whose social world centres on Weasel’s bar and the people willing to pay for his particular skills. Meeting Vanessa changes the scale of his ambitions. Their attraction grows into a relationship in which outrageous humour is part of intimacy, and marriage becomes a real possibility. A terminal cancer diagnosis then threatens the future they have only just begun to imagine. Vanessa wants to face it alongside him, but Wade’s response is to disappear rather than let her watch him deteriorate.

An offer of experimental treatment gives that disappearance a destination. The facility run by Ajax and Angel Dust is brutal, using stress and torture to activate dormant mutations. Wade keeps joking, including about Ajax’s less imposing real name, Francis, even when the situation makes clear that he has surrendered control of his body to people with no interest in his comfort. The process eventually triggers a regenerative ability, but it leaves his skin severely scarred. Surviving is therefore different from getting the future he wanted. Ajax’s suggestion that the damage can be reversed gives Wade a reason to keep chasing him after escaping. The suit conceals the face Wade is afraid to show Vanessa, while its colour and theatricality turn concealment into an identity he can perform. Weasel’s betting pool supplies the name, and Blind Al provides an unconventional home base.

The hunt brings Wade into conflict with two very different ideas of what someone with powers should do. Ajax treats enhanced people as assets in an abusive operation; Colossus wants to bring Wade into the X-Men and teach him responsibility. Negasonic Teenage Warhead accompanies Colossus with much less enthusiasm for long speeches. Their arrival during the highway confrontation interrupts Wade’s attempt to extract a cure, allowing Ajax to get away. The disagreement is also comic because Colossus’s patient explanations assume that Wade is waiting to become morally respectable. Wade’s response shows that injury and regeneration have given him more options without making him interested in that particular career. For all his mockery of superhero conventions, however, his pursuit still depends on a familiar secret-identity problem. He can track dangerous people across the city more easily than he can walk up to Vanessa and explain why he left.

Vanessa becomes the target when Ajax discovers her connection to Wade. Her abduction changes the final confrontation from a hunt for cosmetic restoration into a rescue, though Wade still wants both. He recruits the X-Men he has been resisting and brings them to a scrapyard containing a huge decommissioned aircraft carrier. The location gives the finale an unstable architecture, with platforms, wreckage and towering supports that can collapse around the fighters. Colossus and Negasonic deal with Angel Dust and the surrounding threat while Wade works toward Vanessa and Ajax. The ship’s destruction makes saving someone a physical problem that cannot be solved by a clever speech. Wade protects Vanessa, but victory does not produce the cure he has been promised. Ajax admits there is none. Colossus tries to turn the moment into a lesson about restraint, only for Wade to kill his enemy before the lesson is finished.

The romantic resolution asks a more uncomfortable question than whether Wade can win a fight. Vanessa has been left without an explanation, and seeing that he survived does not make the abandonment acceptable. She is angry before they reconcile. Removing the mask puts Wade’s actual fear in front of the person whose judgment he has been anticipating throughout the story. His face remains scarred; the ending does not reward him with a restored appearance as proof that he deserves love. Their reunion instead requires an account of what happened and why he stayed away. That is a quieter change than adopting a costume, but it reaches the problem the costume could not fix. The film keeps its crude humour around the encounter rather than treating sincerity as a complete personality replacement. Wade can remain difficult, violent and ridiculous while finally allowing Vanessa to make her own response.

Tim Miller’s film builds its comedy through clashes between Wade’s narration and the physical events on screen. The opening credits parody the usual prestige of names and job titles, while later asides acknowledge performers, budgets and the machinery of superhero films. The violence does not stop for the jokes: impacts, severed limbs and regenerative injuries become part of the timing. A body that can recover gives the action unusual room for humiliation, since a painful defeat need not end Wade’s participation. Ryan Reynolds supplies much of that rhythm through speech and movement behind the mask, with other characters acting as resistant audiences inside the story. Colossus’s earnestness, Negasonic’s impatience and Weasel’s practical commentary each produce a different response to him. The post-credits address extends the same relationship with the viewer beyond the plot. The 2016 film finishes its rescue and reunion while leaving Deadpool capable of returning, rather than importing the later sequels’ teams, deaths or wider universe into this first account.