Deadpool - Trailer Review
With the Deadpool trailer well and truly released, I pick apart what it tells us about the Merc with the Mouth's first solo adventure.
Last week the first trailer for the Deadpool movie was released by Fox and allowed those of us who did not go to the San Diego Comic Con to get a flavour of the upcoming movie.
The first thing to note has to be that it looks like a fanboy’s dream. It’s R-rated and not in a half-hearted, indecisive way. The trailer shows brains flying out of people’s heads, strippers and really, really dirty language (“It sounds like you have a d*** in your mouth”).
Fans practically begged Fox to make the film R-rated and it looks like they have responded handsomely.
The other thing Fox has done is stick closely to the comic book version of Deadpool. Most importantly, this means he breaks the fourth wall, referencing stuff he should have no idea about.
This allows the writers to have some fun at the expense of past failures, such as when Deadpool requests that his costume be neither green nor animated – a sharp dig at Ryan Reynold’s failure Green Lantern.
Speaking of Deadpool’s costume, it is possibly the least adapted superhero costume since Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man.
In an age when even the more faithful costume translations tend to tone the colours down or at least add some straps of questionable utility for "realness" (Captain America: The First Avenger), Deadpool’s cinnabar moth-coloured look is plucked straight from the printed page, even to the extent of having his eyes whited-out.
Deadpool also acts in a wildly inappropriate manner. He does not care what anybody thinks and acts exactly as he wants to, whether that’s getting turned on by the smell of his guns or using children’s crayons to draw pictures of what he’s going to do to his enemies while listening to dated hip-hop.
So much for the character Fox is creating but the trailer tells us far more than that about the movie.
They are clearly trying to build up an emotional side to the character. Sometimes, Deadpool can be a bit of a clown in the comics without anything of emotional interest going on.
It is nice, then, that we see Wade Wilson, pre-Deadpool, with his girlfriend discussing the cancer which will cause him to undergo the fateful procedure he hopes will cure him.
Clearly, he is doing it for her and the fallout when everything going wrong and he becomes Deadpool could be interesting.
Emotional relationships could also stem from the inclusion of the Blind Al and Weasel characters.
Although Deadpool’s comic-book relationship with Al could at best be described as abusive, it is an odd, complex relationship and one which has the potential to be quite moving in a disturbing kind of way.
It will be interesting to see if Fox keeps the emphasis on relationships and character development rather than slipping into an endless stream of violence and tasteless but hilarious jokes.
No discussion of the trailer would be complete without reference to the X-Men who showed up. Why are they there?
The two mutants are Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead. Neither of these two are major X-Men in the current movie universe and it is Negasonic’s first appearance so I wonder what their role will be.
Certainly, Colossus does not look happy with Deadpool but it might simply be they were ordered to clean up a mutant mess by X-Men HQ and eventually end up helping him rather than going on to become his major antagonists.
Perhaps more importantly, certainly from the perspective of future movies, it looks like Fox are trying to tie Deadpool into their X-Men universe.
While I feel it would be a stretch to suggest Deadpool will ever be an X-Man (or, considering his cult status, a mainstream X-Villain either) it looks to me very likely he could end up in a future X-Force movie, especially if they bring comic book sparring partner Cable into X-Men: Apocalypse as the stories would easily allow for.
That’s the future though. For now, the trailer shows that, from a Deadpool fan’s perspective, the character is firing on all cylinders and, hopefully, we are on for a violent, inappropriate, laugh-out-loud thrill-fest come next February.
