Deadpool

The story

Full story — spoilers ahead.

Wade Wilson is a mercenary with a mouth that will not stay on the mission. He meets Vanessa, a sex worker who can match his jokes and see the scared man under them, and for a while they have the kind of cheap, happy life people like them are not supposed to get. Then a doctor tells Wade he has terminal cancer. A man in a suit offers a cure that is also an experiment.

The program is run by Ajax, also called Francis, a sadist who believes pain unlocks mutations. Wade is tortured, injected, and left to die in a sealed box. He does not die. He heals from everything, including his own face. He comes out looking like a horror-movie extra and wearing the kind of humor people use when the alternative is screaming. Vanessa thinks he is dead. He lets her. He puts on a red suit so the person she loved does not have to be the person in the mirror.

The movie is a revenge picture that keeps winking at you. Wade wants Ajax because Ajax has the machine that might fix his face, and because some debts are personal. He collects weapons, narrates his own fight scenes, and treats the fourth wall like a door he can kick. He is helped, reluctantly, by Colossus, a metal X-Man who wants him to be a hero, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, a kid who is not impressed. Weasel, his bartender friend, supplies intel and bad advice.

Ajax is not a grand ideologue. He is a man who enjoys breaking people and calling it science. Angel Dust is the muscle beside him. Their trail runs through a convoy, a scrapyard, and a highway fight that is funny until it is not. Wade keeps killing henchmen in inventive ways and then asking whether that was too much. The question is part of the joke and part of the point.

Vanessa is kidnapped because the plot needs her in danger and because Wade’s refusal to be seen has left her unprotected. The final brawl is on a decommissioned Helicarrier of all things, a leftover from someone else’s franchise. Wade wins the fight and does not take the cure. He has decided the face is the price and Vanessa gets to decide if she can live with it. She can. She already knew who he was.

Deadpool is an origin story that hates origin stories. The superpower is regeneration. The real mutation is a man who refuses to let tragedy make him solemn. He is still selfish, still vulgar, and newly unwilling to let the people who tortured him write the ending. The suit is a punchline. The loyalty underneath it is not.