Well, Well, Look Who's Mister Big Movie Star

The trailer for the Deadpool movie came out this week. I will probably be going to see this film, so I've been hopeful it'll be good. I'm not expecting "gets a lot of probably undeserved Oscar buzz" good like The Dark Knight*.  I'll be quite happy with something that makes me laugh, has a relatively coherent story, and in general, doesn't suck. At least the people involved (especially Ryan Reynolds) seem invested in the project. Of course, Nic Cage seemed invested in the Ghost Rider movies, and that didn't work out terribly well, so fingers crossed.

Early indications are, not too shabby. The humor is there, the fight scenes and violence don't look bad. I expect them to get a lot of mileage out of the healing factor, both in terms of the punishment they can deal out to 'Pool, and how creative he'll get with the violence. I'm not the biggest fan of the Joe Kelly run, which is what this seems to draw heavily from, but it was the logical choice under the circumstances. Certainly they weren't going to be basing it off Cable/Deadpool or Agent X. 

I'm a little concerned about actually using X Gonna Give It to Ya for a fight scene, but it sort of matches Deadpool, in that it's a bit of a dated reference, and possibly also trying too hard. It isn't like I don't enjoy listening to that song sometimes. By the same token, of course the fights have lots of flips and slow-mo. I'm curious whether they'll make some joke about the slow-motion partway through the film. Hard to say.

I am hoping there'll be some sort of decent emotional core to the film. Deadpool does have that, beneath the references, and the swords, and the crayyyyyy-ziness. He's a guy who has had a profoundly crappy hand dealt to him, and unlike a lot of super-heroes, he can't just turn around and use it to help others. Instead, he takes a lot of his pain out on others, because he feels the world owes him, while using his insanity as sort of a defense mechanism. Play it as a joke, to the point people just get disgusted, rather than sympathetic, and you can pretend the pain isn't there (or use it to feed in a feeling of being persecuted). What mitigates this slightly, and keeps him from being a villain, is he a) typically kills actual bad people, rather than puppies and orphans, and b) those times where he gets past all that, and actually does the right thing. Wade can and does help people, he just can't always get past his own personal issues (some of which are entirely justified) to do it. But the potential is there, and hopefully the movie does something with that, elevates itself beyond your basic "revenge" plot. Crap, I need to be saving this stuff for his entry on the Supplemental Favorite Marvel Characters list**.

* Though I feel like there's a backlash against the Nolan films in certain sectors of the Internet these days. Which is fine, they weren't exactly my ideal Batman films either - Mask of the Phantasm is still the closest we've gotten to that - it's just a shift from a few years ago, when people held those movies up like they were Citizen Kane or something.

** And now you know 2 of the 8 characters that are gonna be on that list.