After The Fantasic Four last year, I was about done with superheroes. There was something so infuriating about its staunch seriousness in the face of what was clearly one of the silliest looking movies ever made. There's nothing heroic about Miles Teller as a mutant man, arms stretched out like a warm nerd's rope as he slaps people in the face several metres away.
It increasingly feels like the superhero genre has adopted the po-faced earnestness of a first-year philosophy student, so hell-bent on trying to save the world that they won't take a minute to laugh at their funny bow tie and/or cape. Thankfully, not a moment too late, Deadpool has swooped in to embrace the silliness, gut-punch the grimness and skewer convention like a giant kebab.
Ryan Reynolds - who had never quite hit the comedic mark for me since the atrociously good Van Wilder: Party Liaison - takes the lead role as the snarky cynic Deadpool. Based on a ground-breaking, self-aware character of the 90s Marvel stable, Deadpool is the raunchy, selfish and wry anti-hero we need right now.
It also helps that he looks a little like a mashed yam and not Chris Evans in Captain America, a man so perfectly sculpted he would have made Michelangelo weep.
After being diagnosed with terminal cancer and turning to a dodgy healing treatment, Deadpool takes the audience with him on a quest to avenge the man who messed up his face during the procedure. Yes, it's a vanity project in the truest sense of the word. Along the way, he addresses the camera directly, even experimenting with Inception-style fourth wall breaks within fourth wall breaks.
