Deadpool? Doesnt look like your average superhero film

[undercovergeek]

Ill admit i know nothing about the franchise/character

http://www.dorkly.com/post/75251/youre-seriously-missing-out-if-you-dont-watch-the-leaked-deadpool-trailer?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=amplification

but im betting Jason Pratt will turn up and let me know all about it in 19 pages..................... 

[Nefaro]

Ill admit i know nothing about the franchise/character

He's a caricature of typical superheroes, played as an overly gabby joker who has some dissociation with reality.  Doesn't take all of it seriously, in other words.

[JasonPratt]

Deadpool is a survivor of the early stages of the Weapon X program that eventually produced Wolverine (or modded him rather into what we're familiar with today).

He's definitely a mock of the overly serious, or overtly wacky, 90s era gun-toting super-soldiers -- it's no accident that he eventually becomes best friends with Cable, a hugely popular side-character of the X-Men in the 90s (whom we're likely to see being introduced in film soon, since his story is tied strongly to the mutant known as Apocalypse), and they had a buddy comic running for a while until Cable eventually died. (I think he got over it eventually. ;) ) It's also no accident that his combat abilities and costume and name (both real and 'code') and (very roughly speaking) his origin, mirror that of Deathstroke, Slade Wilson, over at the Distinguished Competition. But Deathstroke is a super-serious operator. Deadpool is not.

Deadpool is mercenary Wade Wilson, who after doing a particularly heartless thing (which I won't spoil because I noticed the character who suffered for that deed will be in the movie), and discovering he had developed an aggressive cancer, decided to try turning his life around in the time he had left by volunteering for Canada's Alpha Flight superhero development project. But his psyche was already pretty fractured, so unsurprisingly the government washed him out, and he accepted a position in their more experimental wing, which became Weapon X. The lead scientist speculated that cancer might be the key to artificially duplicating one of Wolverine's natural mutant abilities, radical cell regeneration, and the torturous and inhuman experiments drove Wade even crazier. It did eventually work, but the abilities kicked in only after they killed Wade -- which he had been goading them into with increasingly wacky pranks and hi-jinx (at the expense of Ajax, the lab's enforcer, whom I see will be part of the cast by the way, so they must be getting into that part of the story sooner or later). That's the origin of his nickname, Deadpool: the patients had created a running dead pool on who would die next, and Wade just wanted to die and end his suffering.

After escaping the pre-X facility, Wade emerged with even more of a shattered psyche thanks to how the regeneration process works: the cancer was also supercharged (since after all that's the basis of his regen abilities), so he's constantly dying of brain cancer, which leaves his mind in a permanently botched state. This manifests, with his nigh-indestructability -- even moreso than Wolverine's (though Wade doesn't have adamatium laced bones, so he can in fact be cut up and his bones broken) -- in him being a living Warner Brothers' cartoon.  O0

So you have a guy who at heart wants to be a hero and to atone, to some degree, for the evil he did and still does; but on the other hand he's still a callous self-centered goofball with almost no regard for other people. Consequently he often Jumps The Line back and forth between comedy and horror. Writers love him because they can play with all the pieces of his personality grinding on one another all day long, while putting him in silly, zany WBesque situations.

Anyway, like a lot of late 80s-90s action men, he's a great shot and a great swordsman, who carries a lot of guns and blades. In some versions of the story, his tech sidekick (similar to that of the Punisher) has stolen a personal teleport device from AIM (villainous super-scientists, offshoots from Hydra), so he uses that to pop around somewhat like Nightcrawler with the X-men but not as often or as precisely. You can chop him up and Fed Ex him back to the guy who hired him, or liquify him, and he'll come back eventually. To kill him permanently you'd have to do something like drop him into a star.

He has curious attachments to a lot of Marvel characters -- including the Marvel Zombie universe, since thanks to a crossover event he sometimes carries his own zombie head around. One of the weirder things is that while Thanos (the coming Big Bad of the Avengers films) literally courts Death and wants to win her heart by slaughtering the universe, Death actually loves Deadpool but they can never be together because he can't die.


The "Ultimate" version of Deadpool runs a goofy reality TV show where he persecutes mutants (among other things), and to be honest he's one of the suckier things about that continuity (though when he showed up as a guest villain for a level in the Spider-man game "Shattered Dimensions", they wrote him pretty well. Edited to add: no surprise, PETER DAVID wrote that entry! Naturally he loves the main continuity Deadpool, so wrote the character much closer to that instead of the horrible bigoted psycho from the Ultimates. PD was seminal in writing Spidey back in his pre-Venom black suit days, so there's a nice meta-callback in having him write a version of Ultimate Spidey in a costume he hates much worse than in main continuity but which, for the game, works temporarily better now.) In main continuity he loves mutants so much he wants to be one, and often insists on being identified with them, as an in-universe joke about how his character started out as an X-Man villain and because of his super-powers readers kept thinking he was a mutant.

Anyway. He's the Merc with a Mouth. Usually sometimes tries not to kill innocent bystanders, unless he forgets; sometimes even gives up killing thugs for Lent. He was finally killed off for real this past April, just in time for Marvel to reboot and shuffle their continuities around (which for Marvel is a pretty big thing), so he'll be back soon after taking a bit of a break from overexposure.

Ryan Reynolds played Wade briefly in pre-Deadpool merc days, where despite having no powers he hung with mutant-powered mercs led by Sabretooth and Wolverine; in the movie We Shall Not Name, not least because they completely botched his transformation into Deadpool. He's a big fan of the character, and always wanted to do a legitimate Deadpool movie. Whether it'll actually be good on screen or not, we'll see: he could be a tricky character to get right, even when people are trying to aim for that.


His entries at TVTropes.org are pretty extensive as you might expect.

[JasonPratt]

One of his best non-comic appearances has been in the later eps of the webseries I'm a Marvel... and I'm a DC.

[undercovergeek]

ill watch any superhero that smells his guns and says 'im touchng myself tonight'

[BanzaiCat]

If they write Deadpool correctly (and that's a mighty big 'if'), he could easily be the best character in the entire MCU. He's always been one of my favorites...smart-ass, smart-mouth, cancer balanced by Wolverine-like healing factor issues, death machine. :)

[JasonPratt]

We've been amazingly fortunate he's been written well as often as he has been so far, come to think of it. I thought the Deadpool game writing was often a mis-step, even though technically it was in-character. (Though I realize I'm in the minority about this.)

I'm honestly sort-of worried about this being an R-rated film. But then I think humor generally works better when it isn't R-rated. This probably factors into why I thought the Deadpool game writing was a big mis-step. (It's also why I'm schizophrenically ambivalent on average about the coming Ash vs Evil Dead TV series.)

For those who skipped past my wall of text and want to see a 9 minute illustrated lecture video instead:

[MetalDog]

I think all of you have missed a very important point (although, JP may have covered it in his Wall Of Screed (which I just pass right over to keep my sanity)), but, RYAN REYNOLDS IS PLAYING DEADPOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Therefore, the movie will suck.  Just move along.

[JasonPratt]

I did mention it; I think I also mentioned that even people who hate Wolverine: Origins: X-Tie (or whatever) tend to agree he did a perfectly fine job playing a young Wade Wilson. Having seen the film, I agree with the general agreement.

I also agree the writers literally butchered the character when he returns at the end, so that they might as well not have even called him Deadpool. I honestly don't know whether Ryan was playing him at all in those scenes; but if so, his performance there cannot be predicated as evidence for how well he'll do in the 'real' Deadpool film. The test film and the trailer give better evidence for that.

Similarly, his acting wasn't the problem with Green Lantern; the material was the problem. He did reasonably well in the movie tie-in game, despite often sounding like he was phoning his lines in; the writing and directing were simply that much better.

The upshot is that he depends on good writing and directing; he can't elevate shoddy material even when he's trying hard to do so -- and I have to admit he did try hard in the GL film.

[Nefaro]

I did mention it; I think I also mentioned that even people who hate Wolverine: Origins: X-Tie (or whatever) tend to agree he did a perfectly fine job playing a young Wade Wilson. Having seen the film, I agree with the general agreement.

Yeah, I thought he did the part well. 

While the guy has done some crap parts, I don't necessarily think he's a terrible actor compared to to most of them.

[MetalDog]

You're probably right about Reynolds.  He just looks and acts like a complete douchenozzle in all his films, so, I just assume he's that way outside of films, too.

[JasonPratt]

Well, Deadpool often acts that way, too, so... not really a stretch.

[MetalDog]

I expect that to be true, Jason.  That's why, for once, I am actually going to see a Ryan Reynolds film on purpose.

[bayonetbrant]

Red band trailer

maybe it's just me, but when Reynolds is in the suit and mouthing off, I just keep hearing Jason Lee instead of RR

[Huw the Poo]

Well, that looks boring.