This past week, three of my friends and I went to see Deadpool in theaters and I was starkly reminded why I didn’t want to be interested in superheroes for a long time.
Deadpool is the story of a smart-mouthed-mercenary-turned-antihero-with-superpowers. The story centers on a man called Wade Wilson who is diagnosed with multiple different kinds of terminal cancer. In order to get better, he agrees to let a shady organization experiment on him, and ultimately he is given the ability to heal from virtually anything. At the same time, he’s deformed, and because of this he’s too afraid to go back to the woman to whom he had been engaged before the diagnosis. The main action of Deadpool is Wade trying to get revenge for what had been done to him.
You can’t exactly call Deadpool a superhero (and he even says in the movie trailer that his story isn’t the typical superhero story that we’re all so familiar with) given his motives and his methods. The movie was rated R, so I got what I expected from it—lots of guns and shooting, plenty of gore, a fair share of nudity, and a dictionary’s worth of new “offensive” language. It was filled with hilariously dark comedy and slow-mo action shots. In short, a perfect action movie.
For this reason, I wasn’t at all surprised when my friends and I (all of us girls) walked into the movie theater and found that to every one woman in the audience was there with at least four or five men. I could probably have counted on my fingers the number of women seeing the movie that night, while row after row was filled with groups of guys. It wasn’t surprising, as action movies are almost never catered to women, and historically comic book heroes have always been boys’ territory. That’s why during those transitory years during adolescence I paid more attention to awful vampire romance and “girly” obsessions rather than admitting I loved sci-fi and action movies.
But you know what? I absolutely loved Deadpool. The humor, even at its crudest, had me laughing so hard I teared up a few times. I thought the characters were interesting and deep. I found the story engaging and exciting. It had more than just your stereotypical hyper-masculine action flick, and it was these little details that stood out to me.
First, Wade might have superpowers and be an incredible fighter, but he’s not what you’d expect from this kind of character. He has an Adventure Time watch and a Hello Kitty bag. He makes friends with people in the most unlikely of circumstances, including a taxi driver and an elderly blind woman.
But the thing I was most impressed with is that he treats women with respect. It would have been so easy to slip into the trope of the tortured anti-hero who runs through women every day of the week. Instead, the movie opens with Wade on a mercenary job where he has to take care of a guy who was stalking a teenage girl. The screenwriters could have chosen any other scenario to highlight his fighting skills or his snark right off the bat, but they chose to give him a job where he is defending a woman. And then when his love interest, Vanessa, is introduced, she immediately shows him that she can take care of herself and Wade respects that. In fact, he loves her for that.
In general, the women in Deadpool were treated well. As I was watching the film I was waiting for the gratuitous nude scene that is present in almost every hyper-masculine action movie, and while there was nudity it didn’t just showcase women’s bodies. Male characters were given the same exposure female characters were, and while that was unexpected it was interesting and a nice change to see some kind of equality. That wasn’t only present in on-screen exposure, either. The other women in the movie were given powers that were sometimes even more impressive than their male counterparts.
In a genre where it would have been easy to fill out every boring, male-catered stereotype, Deadpool does so much more while still pleasing all kinds of audiences (of appropriate age, of course). I know for a fact that the guys in the theater enjoyed the movie just as much as my friends and I did, which just goes to show that superhero movies and action movies don’t need to rely on naked women and hardened, hyper-masculine heroes to make a good movie. And in my opinion, Deadpool was a great movie.
Image Credit: Giphy, Screen Rant, New Media Rockstars