Deadpool

Deadpool was brilliant. Plenty of laugh out loud moments, very tongue-in-cheek, sending itself up, in the same vein as Ant-Man but with a prison’s worth of swearing and a substantial gout of gore. People don’t just get meatily punched or kicked into things, they get their brains blown out, their flesh burnt, bones broken, heads cut off and Deadpool himself actually gets a metal pipe rammed through his body immediately post-transformation and a knife stuck into his skull. My sister and I had a disagreement about whether or not the film could be considered to have a plot, and if the bad guys were just evil for the sake of it, which is always laziness.

The humour is intentionally crude, and the slightly misogynistic comment I saw as just another send-up of people jumping onto the comic bandwagon since the Marvel Cinematic Universe started up. I disagree that the bad guys were ‘evil for the sake of evil’ – it was pretty clear to me that they were merchants of war, supplying illicit arms to various terrorist organisations and countries at war, and the creation of the ‘super-slaves’ was part of this agenda. That was their evil plan, chugging along in the background: making a profit from turning strangers into mutants and enslaving them to be used as disposable weapons in global conflicts.

The main plot of the film hasn’t got anything to do with the motivations of the bad guys – it’s basically Wade Wilson’s roaring rampage of revenge, to punish Ajax for the torture he was subjected to that made him a mutant, and to force him to reverse the hideous scarring he suffered from the mutagenic process. It only gets more personal after Ajax kidnaps Wilson’s girlfriend Vanessa to try and use her as a bargaining chip to bring Wilson’s violent predations on his organisation to an end.

On a subtler level, I can see that another part of the plot is Wilson having to come to terms with the consequences of seeking a cure for his terminal cancer rather than accepting that he might die young. He chose the opportunity to better himself over his love for Vanessa, which he comes to regret after his transformation, having become so deformed that he doubts Vanessa’s feelings will remain if she sees what he has become. He chose a selfish path and was punished; he ignored Vanessa’s pleas to stay with her, fight the cancer, perhaps die as gracefully as possible, sure in the knowledge of her love, and lost her.

His journey to getting back what he’d given up is not just about confronting Ajax, it is about finding the courage to see Vanessa face to face and let her see him, to let her decide if she can still love him in spite of his terrible deformities. Another subplot is the X-Men attempting to recruit Deadpool, and while he spurns them for the umpteenth time at the start, he eventually goes to them for help and they accompany him into the final fight as his back-up against Ajax. This is my long-winded way of saying there’s definitely a plot and the bad guys definitely have their reasons. What, do you not think that greed is a reason for action? Greed and war-mongering and sadism? I do.