If Wade Wilson is Marvel’s most multifaceted, and oddly human, male protagonist yet, it’s only because his cinematic peers are characterized by facile monotony; where Steve Rodgers is more beset by his inane and boyish naiveté than any super villain, Wilson is most beleaguered by his insecurities, chief among them a fragile masculinity that he masks with profanity and a potty mouth.
That hard-R humor makes the film. Whenever it lightens up, even for a second, it lags. The filmmakers are well aware of this, and waste no time in their ‘lampooning’ of the studio that financed this whole affair, beginning with a credits sequence comprising various superhero movie clichés—”hot chick,” “British villain,” etc.—that, by the film’s end, sadly seem more like promises than jokes, as Morena Baccarin gets to do nothing but look hot as Wilson’s love interest and Ed Skrein has the charisma of a cardboard cutout of a cardboard cutout as Ajax, easily the least frightening and most uninteresting villain in recent memory.
The film hinges on Ryan Reynolds as Wilson, the casual mercenary who, after being diagnosed with cancer, is wronged, naturally, and subsequently becomes the titular “super”. Reynolds has yearned to play Deadpool for more than a decade, and his enthusiasm is not only evident but infectious. Despite his story being utterly unmoving in its asininity and staleness, we care for Wilson because there’s seemingly nothing Reynolds won’t do to make this film work. We have fun because he has fun.
There’s really no plot to cover because Deadpool is a classic superhero origin story in that it is plotless and predictable. Its nonlinear structure ensures that nothing surprising happens, and this wouldn’t be all that bothersome if the film bothered to skewer this shortcoming like it does many of its others. A few measures are taken to spruce things up a bit, but most of them, especially the two X-Men sidekicks, come off as afterthoughts. The doe-eyed yet surprisingly sadistic taxi driver and blind, crack-addled roommate are nice, and fitting, touches, though.
          Deadpool is at its best when it’s sending up every possible aspect of the Marvel brand. It makes a mistake every time it stops to breathe or explain its pathetic excuse for a plot. The blacker and darker the jokes, the gorier the violence, the better. In other words, the further it gets from a classic Marvel film, the closer it comes to greatness, and that’s probably why it’s so far from perfect.

          Deadpool opened last Friday, February 12, to a record-shattering $132.7 million, the biggest opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie, besting The Matrix Reloaded‘s $91.7 million debut. It is also the biggest-ever opening for 20th Century Fox, the film’s distributor; for a directorial debut; for an X-Men film; for a film released in January or February; and for a film released on President’s Day weekend. (Its four-day cume was $150 million.)