Given Fox’s poor track record with the X-Men films, whether or not I should watch this wasn’t exactly a sure bet. It was released while I was distracted by family stuff during the Chinese New Year and seems to have been very well received while I wasn’t paying much attention. That explains why I’ve also just now gone to the cinema to check it out.

There’s little need to summarize the plot. It’s the standard rescue the damsel in distress story with the superhero’s origin story folded in. Thankfully director Tim Miller appears to understand how tedious this could be, especially the origin flashback that goes on for too long, and splices it in between plenty of action scenes that take place in the present. I will say that this film obviously suffers from its restricted access to Marvel characters. The finale for example feels a little silly when the villains bring only the same two super-powered characters and a bunch of mercenaries with firearms. It isn’t clear to me what the main villain expected would happen as Deadpool had already defeated him in one-on-one combat in both of their previous encounters. Still I liked that the stakes in this story are purely personal. I was getting bored with how every Marvel movie needs to be about saving the world.

Of course the story is just a thin shell for all of the gory violence and most of all the non-stop stream of jokes. To be honest, the jokes come so thick and so fast that I was starting to get annoyed. It didn’t help either that there were probably more misses than hits for me, probably due to references that I missed. Yet it’s impossible not to be impressed by how brave the filmmakers are in ensuring this film-version of the character is just as much of a 4th-wall breaking asshole as the comics version. You may not love the character or find all of the jokes funny, but this is still new ground for superhero movies, toilet humor and all. The same goes for the action scenes. There’s nothing in there that looks especially spectacular to me but it’s so refreshing to finally see a superhero movie that finally dares to show the gory effects of superhuman abilities on human flesh. The moment when they slammed that mook onto the signboard and it pulped into an unrecognizable mass felt satisfyingly cathartic to me.

Perhaps because it is confident that it can leave the children outside of the cinema hall, Deadpool is also one of the rare superhero films that doesn’t treat the audience as idiots. The plot may be dead simple but that just means that there’s no room there for any holes. Rather than avoid the issue or invent some convoluted explanation of why there are only two X-Men present, the film confronts it head on and treats it as part of the joke. Rather than make you feel dumber for having watched it as in so many action movies, this one actually makes you feel smarter when you get the jokes. The only flaw here is that Deadpool’s face just isn’t ugly enough considering that it’s actually the character’s driving motivation throughout the film. Ryan Reynolds himself has acknowledged that there’s only so far that you can go in making the protagonist of a Hollywood action movie disgustingly hideous.

Deadpool is still far from being one of my favorite superhero movies as I don’t particularly care for its brand of humor. But I respect that it manages to carve a unique niche for itself from Marvel’s large cast of characters and I can only hope to see more of this.