Deadpool, as a character, came at the end of my new comic buying period (that is, I went to college and stopped buying them whenever I came up with a buck and they had new titles at the drugstores as they did in those days). I know, I know; I’ve been known to go to the comic book shop in the last decade and pick up a run or two of Dynamite titles, mostly revamped old properties like Conan or Red Sonja or whatever. Also, he came out in the mutant books, the X-Men and all their spinoffs, and those were not my first choice amongst the new titles–I preferred Spider-Man, Captain America, Wonder-Man, Quasar, and the Avengers over the X-everythings which I found to be too soap-opery.
According to whatever Wikipedia is quoting, the character’s creator says this about Deadpool:
Liefeld spoke on how the character was influenced by Spider-Man: “The simplicity of the mask was my absolute jealousy over Spider-Man and the fact that both of my buddies, [fellow Marvel artists] Erik Larsen and Todd McFarlane, would tell me, ‘I love drawing Spider-Man. You just do an oval and two big eyes. You’re in, you’re out.’ … The Spider-Man I grew up with would make fun of you or punch you in the face and make small cracks. That was the entire intent with Deadpool. … I specifically told Marvel, ‘He’s Spider-Man, except with guns and swords.’ The idea was, he’s a jackass.” Other inspirations were Wolverine and Snake Eyes. Liefeld states: “Wolverine and Spider-Man were the two properties I was competing with at all times. I didn’t have those, I didn’t have access to those. I had to make my own Spider-Man and Wolverine. That’s what Cable and Deadpool were meant to be, my own Spider-Man and my own Wolverine.”
You know, I described him to my beautiful wife the same way: He’s got the wisecracks of Spider-Man, but crass. Also, he’s an anti-hero. He’s definitely of the age that was dawning in the 1990s and in this 21st century.
So the film is his origin story: A thug-for-hire falls in love with a beautiful woman as crazy as he is (played by Morena Baccarin), but learns he has advanced cancer. So he goes to a black market mutant factory where they promise to cure him, but the torturous process, which is actual torture, is designed to stress people to trigger mutagenic change, but the ultimate goal is to create mutants and sell them as slaves or soldiers. Deadpool gets away and then goes hunting for the people who did this to him–made him practically immortal but with scarred to the point that people shun him on the street. They find out who he was and kidnap Marena Baccarin, and a great fight ensues, and Deadpool gets help from Colossus and Negasonic who are familiar with Deadpool whom they want to join the X-forces. Bam, zang, crass, and finis!
I mean, it was all right. I’m growing a little more tolerance for the crass these days, and it did have the comic book movie thing going for it. Apparently the comics also had Deadpool breaking the fourth wall, kind of like She-Hulk in her late 1980s series. Which means it wasn’t as groundbreaking as they might have thought–other comics were doing the Deadpool schticks, but I guess something about this particular character caught on enough that they were making movies about him thirty-some years later. So Marvel has that going for them, which is nice.
My youngest, who watched it with me, was eager to watch the next one if we had it. Oh, but no, gentle reader; when my beautiful wife bought the film for me indirectly for Valentine’s Day, she did not get the second. And one suspects that the latest, Deadpool and Wolverine, might not make an appearance on physical media at all.
And although the film does feature Morena Baccarin who is, what, fifteen years older than she was in Firefly when this film came out? You would have to probably draw a variety of charts and tables with lots of science in them to prove it to me–even though it has Morena Baccarin in it, it is also the first film I’ve seen with Gina Carano in it. So Gina Carano it is.
If you’ve been on the Internet a bit, you know that she was (or is) an MMA fighter who also did American Gladiators in one of its reboots apparently. She’s headlined her own film, and she had a big part in the Star Wars show The Mandalorian until she did a Twitter and was cut and a planned spin-off featuring her character deep-sixed. But you’re on the Internet, and you know it.
In this film, she plays Angel Dust, the big boss’s henchwoman who only has a couple of lines and pounds on Colossus for a while. It would be interesting to see her in something with a little more to it, but her career is taking off when physical media is tailing off, so I imagine the pickings will be slim. Pity. She is quite pretty.
