With a massively successful cinema release earlier in the year, Deadpool, Marvel’s most prestigious and potty-mouthed anti-hero film, finally made its way to DVD, Blu-ray and digital download this week. It’s been an eagerly awaited home entertainment release for a while now and for the most part it doesn’t disappoint with its irreverent style, great comedy and killer – we literally mean killer – action.
The plot is a clever parody of a traditional love story where boy meets girl of negotiable virtue, girl gets woowed over a carnival game (that’s not a euphemism, by the way, they’re not needed where Deadpool is concerned) and they both fall madly in love with a kinky spirit where national holidays are concerned. However, it all goes nipples northwards when our boy, ex-military mercenary Wade Wilson, gets diagnosed with latter-stage terminal lung cancer, not too long after they get engaged, and decides he doesn’t want to put Vanessa through the misery of watching him die.
Out of desperation he decides to take up an offer from a mysterious organisation that could cure him, while also giving him super human powers. While the tortuous procedure is sort of successful, it leaves him horribly disfigured. In fact, check out the trailer below, which should give you a good idea about the plot without giving too much away, but the main point is that it works very well as the origin story behind the red-suited, deviant anti-hero.
Ryan Reynolds (Criminal) puts in a good shift as Deadpool and while he’s got some great lines from writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, he delivers them with aplomb, which is no easy task combining deadpan humour, 4th wall dry humps and pitch-perfect schock-jock put-downs. The rest of the cast compliments this very well with a cracking performance from Morena Baccarin, who plays his main squeeze, Vanessa; matching him in fast-paced wit, while still retaining a certain level of sweetness. T.J. Miller (Big Hero 6) kicks out some funny lines as his best pal Weasel, and the same can be said of Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, an elderly blind woman he lives with post mutation. Gina Carano is full-on direct and impassive as the artificially mutated member of Weapon X, Angel Dust, Brianna Hildebrand brings in teen deadpan frost as Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Stefan Kapicic is impassive resolve personified as the massive Colossus.
Ed Skrein makes for a decent enough bad guy as Francis Freeman, AKA Ajax, the leader of the team working on the arms-dealing Weapon X programme, but he wasn’t quite strong enough to be the main protagonist. If he’d been the front man with a much bigger boss in the background pulling the strings it would have been a better power base to hook the film off.
That aside, Deadpool has a lot of boxes ticked with willy drawings and while it’s not quite got the impact to make it a keeper for everyone it’s definitely worth a watch in the very least. Director Tim Miller (Thor: The Dark World) has pulled together a bootylicious introduction for the man in red and if the jokes and snappy dialogue don’t do it for you then the action, fight scenes and CGI wonders should finish the job off.
Deadpool DVD review: 4/5
