The Monday Morning 'Deadpool' Review: A Spoiler-Filled Dive Into The Surprising Smash Hit

Although he has spent his entire career making it easy to root for him – he is one charismatic fellow – Ryan Reynolds has been unfortunate enough to stumble through a few too many misfires. His first stab at playing Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine remains an embarrassing low point of modern superhero cinema. It wasn't his choice to have the most talkative Marvel character of all time get his mouth sewn shut for the climax, but it's hard to forget. The same goes for Green Lantern, an aimless film made with no passion that strands him in the middle of a bunch of nonsense without a life preserver. You can actually see Reynolds struggling to stay afloat in a film that is doing everything in its power to drown him.

So Deadpool is a real "third time's the charm" situation for Reynolds, who is finally allowed to let go of any preconceived notions of being a proper leading man or a straightforward cinematic superhero. It turns out that he's a comedic force to be reckoned with you remove his boundaries. Like the movie surrounding him, Reynolds' performance as Wade Wilson is finely controlled chaos and his rat-a-tat delivery of one joke after another is as impressive as it is a little exhausting. Four days after seeing it, I'm still chuckling at him staring at his shattered wrists and his limp hands, only to mutter that all dinosaurs feared the T-Rex. It's dumb joke and a fast aside, but the fact that it's sticking with me says something.

And while much of the conversation regarding Reynolds will rightfully focus on his comic chops, his work in the film's handful of key dramatic moments still work. The sequence where he's prisoner in Ajax's laboratory is brutal stuff and Wade's gallows humor keeps these scenes from feeling entirely miserable. At the same time, Reynolds lets us see how a sense of humor can keep you alive, to keep a spark of life going even as your physical body is torn to pieces.

Deadpool may have advanced healing, but his real superpower is his unstoppable mouth – he talks and he talks because he's so broken that he needs to remind himself that he's alive. His immature dick jokes are armor. This is not a heavy film by any means, but it's easy to appreciate how Reynolds builds a proper character out of those rapid fire jokes.

There are too many jokes in Deadpool to count. If one gag doesn't work for you, just wait another ten seconds because the next dozen that are just around the corner may stick. Deadpool is a film constructed entirely out of attitude and that attitude is powered by non-stop jokes delivered at Airplane!-pace. Come for the superhero antics, stay for Wade Wilson's hilarious opinion on the Taken movies.

Most importantly, the film maintains Deadpool's penchant for breaking the fourth wall, for being just crazy enough (or just sane enough?) to know that he's in a comic book/comic book movie. The self-awareness begins from the very first frame, with an opening credits sequence that feels like a very deliberate riff on the heavily stylized, hugely dramatic credits that you see attached to every other comic book movie. But rather than allow the camera to swirl through digital landscapes that represent the noble and bold iconography of more traditional heroes, Deadpool features opening credits that were seemingly designed by Deadpool himself. The camera moves through an action scene on pause, lingering over all kinds of outrageous violence while the credits refuse to name names, reducing each actor and character to stock stereotype.

With an introduction like this, the film makes it very clear from the get-go that it's going to trample all over its own genre. Most of the film's comedy is immature silliness, but it's the biting takedown of typical superhero tropes that truly land. In the pages of Marvel comics, Deadpool could not have existed until he had years of comic book stories to riff on, to gleefully tear to pieces. And cinematic Deadpool could not have existed in this form a decade ago – we had to be 16 years into the age superhero movies for audiences to fully appreciate this character's specific shade of craziness. Deadpool is an assault on the familiar and there's nothing more familiar to modern audiences than comic book films.

Over the weekend, you could see the embers of controversy being stoked. You see, Deadpool is what the kids these days like to call "problematic." It takes no prisoners and it's mean and it has the maturity of a 13-year old boy. It's problematic by design. It wants to push your buttons and it wants to annoy you and irritate you and cause a ruckus when parents take their kids to a superhero movie and have to explain what the hell pegging is. Don't Google that at school or work.

I personally saw a few discussions about how Deadpool treats its female characters, with one writer I respect labeling it as a feminist work and another decrying everything about the the women in the film. My reaction to this falls somewhere in the middle – there's no way in hell I'd call this film feminist, but it certainly bears no hatred for the women in its cast. It tends to place them on equal footing with the male characters. Brianna Hildebrand's Negasonic Teenage Warhead is, like Colossus, a straight surface upon which Deadpool's gags can bounce. Gina Carano's Angel Dust is, like Ajax, a relatively dull villain who represents a physical obstacle and little more.

However, it's Morena Baccarin's Vanessa that feels like the key to this whole movie. Sure, she's been stripped of her powers and sure, she sounds nothing short of awful on paper (the damsel in distress and a hooker with a heart of gold!), but her relationship with Wade may very well be the most compelling component of the entire film. They bond over a mutual love of depraved, morbid humor. They talk about everything from Volton to Bernadette Peters. And in a superhero movie first, their relationship is explicitly sexual, with the film being entirely unafraid to actually showcase the actual lives of two adults in a committed relationship. Tony Stark and Pepper Potts might as well be chaste and saving themselves for marriage, whereas Wade and Vanessa are going to make a bunch of people Google pegging. (Please don't Google pegging if you're at work.)

Vanessa does fall victim to a few tropes. She gets to spend the middle of the movie mourning her lost boyfriend and she gets kidnapped by the bad guys so the hero has someone to save in the climax. And yet, the surprisingly naturalism and the raunchy realism of their relationship lends some weight to this set-up. Vanessa isn't just Deadpool's girlfriend – she is Wade's partner and a woman whom the movie has allowed us to love away from the confines of the actual plot. Deadpool may move fast, but it's telling that it only really slows down when these two are falling for each other and falling into a committed relationship. She may be a damsel in distress, but she's not the hero's prize – she's the woman he'd kill an army to rescue. There's a big difference.

We already know that we're getting a Deadpool 2. It was announced before the film opened and that $135 million opening weekend really sealed the deal. We can already imagine what a direct sequel to this movie looks like – more of the same, just bigger and nuttier and dumber. And that's entirely fine.

The real question to ponder is what the X-Men movies will look like in a post-Deadpool landscape, especially since Ryan Reynolds has already made it clear that an X-Force movie is a priority and the Deadpool post-credits scene promises an appearance from the character of Cable in future films. And this is where I have to put on my Concerned Nerd hat. As much as I enjoyed Deadpool, I don't want an X-Force movie that feels like this. Deadpool can and should be in an X-Force film, but to make that a comedic film in the same vein as his solo film would be a mistake.

For those who don't know, the X-Force is a mutant superhero team who function like the X-Men without the need to put on a good and heroic show. They often work in the shadows. They get their hands dirty. They touch the business that the regular X-Men never would. The team's mission and line-up has changed frequently over the years, but their title has often been a place to explore the darker underbelly of the X-Men corner of the Marvel universe. That's a strong concept for a film and it would be a shame to see that team reduced to the supporting cast of Deadpool 2.

While Deadpool's first film is very much a comedy, it's easy to imagine him sliding into the cast of a more serious film. In his own movie, Deadpool is a friendly, self-aware tour guide through violent and wacky adventures. In an ensemble, he's a chattering lunatic, a wild card who doesn't shut up who is funny to us and irritating the rest of the team. Ryan Reynolds should be allowed to play Deadpool for as long as 20th Century Fox will make these movies, but I sincerely hope everyone takes a break and considers how to incorporate this character the larger X-Men universe. It would be easy to let him overpower everyone else, to become the dominant focus of every ensemble he joins. But the stronger choice, the better choice, would be to find a way to let him coexist with a line-up of other great characters.