Dead­pool

At the UK press screen­ing of Dead­pool, those in atten­dance were ush­ered into the screen­ing room after being plied with tequi­la, chimichangas and unhealth­ily high lev­els of DMX’s ​‘X Gon’ Give It to Ya’. Once seat­ed, a hold­ing sound­track com­pris­ing yet more DMX was quick­ly drowned out by the sound of matey chat­ter ema­nat­ing from the row behind. It’s com­mon in these sit­u­a­tions to have to endure oth­er people’s ban­ter while wait­ing for the film to start, but in this instance the mind­less tit­ter­ing was mere­ly a taster of what was to come.

Dead­pool is the first dis­as­ter movie of 2016 – a chest-bump­ing, fourth wall-break­ing, shot-slam­ming, wedgie-pulling emo­ji­la­to­ry mess that brash­ly announces itself as the shiny new nadir of the post­mod­ern super­hero block­buster. They should have called it Snark­na­do, such is the fierce, destruc­tive force with which the cyclone of crude­ly-siphoned inter­net humour sweeps through this lame adap­ta­tion of Rob Liefeld and Fabi­an Nicieza’s com­ic-book creation.

Ryan Reynolds, dis­play­ing the emo­tion­al depth of a grin­ning car­toon turd, does a decent job in the title role at being both irri­tat­ing­ly hand­some and a total prick. The prob­lem is that his character’s bird-flip­ping brava­do is a weak sub­sti­tute for actu­al charis­ma. Wade Wil­son is a sociopath – a self-pro­claimed bad guy who gets paid to fuck up even worse guys – and as such his basic lack of charm and empa­thy makes per­fect sense. So by attempt­ing to give him dis­cernible human emo­tions and flaws, pre­sum­ably for fear that he might oth­er­wise come across like just anoth­er one-dimen­sion­al leather-clad ego, screen­writ­ing duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wer­nick suc­ceed only in turn­ing Dead­pool into a walk­ing, (smack)talking contradiction.

He’s also, as revealed dur­ing an over­long and strange­ly fetishised ori­gin sto­ry tor­ture sequence, able to regen­er­ate Wolver­ine-style, effec­tive­ly mak­ing him immor­tal. Which means there’s no sense of per­il, which makes it hard to care about any­thing that hap­pens to him. It doesn’t help that Wil­son is the kind of per­son who’d offer to buy you a pint only to dunk his gen­i­tals in the glass the moment your back is turned.

If Dead­pool is the ulti­mate anti-hero, then this is the ulti­mate anti-movie. It des­per­ate­ly wants to have its nov­el­ty erot­ic cake and eat it, but all the time the film spends glee­ful­ly assert­ing itself as rule-break­ing, bound­ary-push­ing out­lier only serves to rein­force the sus­pi­cion that it is cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly nei­ther of those things. Because no amount of wacky irrev­er­ence and wank gags can mask the fact that this Dead­pool is lit­tle more than a duti­ful com­pa­ny man, the kind of faux-chum­my author­i­ty fig­ure who claims to have the com­mon touch but spends his week­ends rub­bing shoul­ders with top-rank­ing execs at high­ly exclu­sive coun­try clubs.

Though not offi­cial­ly part of the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse, Dead­pool pro­vides an unfriend­ly reminder of the studio’s mus­cle via fre­quent nods to the Avengers and X‑Men. Which is fine up to a point – after all, these fran­chis­es need all the sup­port they can get – but does make the entire con­ven­tion-skew­er­ing, self-dep­re­cat­ing act feel just a smidge disin­gen­u­ous. The Dead­pool dilem­ma, then, is not how do you make an R‑rated super­hero movie with enough box office sta­mi­na to leave a last­ing impres­sion on the pub­lic con­scious­ness, but how do you make some­thing feel fresh when it has absolute­ly noth­ing new to add to the cul­ture from which it arose?

Before he direct­ed Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn did some­thing gen­uine­ly sub­ver­sive with Super, while both Kick-Ass and Scott Pil­grim man­aged to stay true to their fierce­ly inde­pen­dent com­ic-book roots. Those films not only gave us great action and orig­i­nal, relat­able pro­tag­o­nists, they did so while main­tain­ing an invig­o­rat­ing anar­chic streak that allowed them to affec­tion­ate­ly mock the homogenised, mythol­o­gy-obsessed mod­ern super­hero genre with­out com­plete­ly com­pro­mis­ing their broad­er com­mer­cial prospects. Even more cru­cial­ly, these char­ac­ters came from a place of angst and inad­e­qua­cy, where­as Wil­son stands for the very thing that made us believe in super­heroes in the first place: social injustice.

There’s also the mat­ter of Wilson’s curi­ous pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with anal sex, which he makes numer­ous casu­al ref­er­ences to and at one point is even shown engag­ing in; the pre­cise moment of pen­e­tra­tion cap­tured in a vis­i­bly uncom­fort­able #noho­mo reac­tion shot that unequiv­o­cal­ly qual­i­fies his true ori­en­ta­tion. The end­less stream of pro­fan­i­ty, vio­lence and sex – and the obvi­ous plea­sure Wil­son derives from it all – is sup­posed to rein­force the image of Dead­pool as a red-blood­ed alpha male. And yet every­thing instead points to an acute cri­sis of mas­culin­i­ty, which at least gives the film some cul­tur­al relevance.