Trailer Trashin’: Breaking Down the Deadpool Red Band Trailer

Hello again, dear readers, and I hope you all avoided Fantastic Four like the plague this past weekend. On that topic, this is three weeks in a row that I’ve covered a comic book movie here on Trailer Trashin’. Now let’s dive into the new red band trailer for Deadpool.

Premise: In an attempt to cure his terminal cancer, former special forces operative Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is subjected to an experiment that leaves him with accelerated healing powers, disfigured skin, and a dark and twisted sense of humor. Armed with new abilities and a new identity as “Deadpool,” Wilson hunts down the man who nearly destroyed his life.

NOTE: This is a red band trailer, which means it can only play in theaters with R-rated movies, and therefore is not appropriate for those under the age of seventeen. This trailer contains tons of violence, plenty of blood and gore, and a decent bit of nudity, so it is definitely Not Safe For Work.

My take: Deadpool, real name Wade Winston Wilson, is a Marvel Comics antihero who is mainly associated with the X-Men, and with Wolverine in particular. He is a mentally unstable and physically disfigured mercenary with a superhuman healing ability, and is also known as the “Merc with a Mouth” because of his tendency to never shut up and habit of breaking the fourth wall, one of the few Marvel characters aware that he’s fictional and part of a comic book.

Ryan Reynolds, who is known for being a big comic book fan, played the character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), but while the early stuff of him as Wade Wilson was good, the version of Deadpool that he ended up becoming was so different from the source material that he was essentially Deadpool in name only. Now, Reynolds is getting another chance with Deadpool, a solo film that looks to be doing justice to the Merc with a Mouth. The first red band trailer for Deadpool is here, and it looks like just the over-the-top, profane, violent good time one would hope for.

0:04-0:07: Wade Wilson with his girlfriend Vanessa Carlysle (Morena Baccarin). In the comics, Vanessa is a mutant with light blue skin and white hair who goes by the codename Copycat, and has the abilities of shape-shifting and power mimicry. We’ll see if any of that gets brought in to the film.

0:22-0:23: Wade on a gurney, being wheeled into some kind of creepy hospital/laboratory. In the comics, Wade is turned into Deadpool by Weapon X, the same secret Canadian government program that created Wolverine, among other characters. It’ll be interesting to see if this make this connection explicit in the movie, or just allude to it. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just refer to it as Weapon X for the time being.

0:34-0:36: As Wade is wheeled in, he says “And please don’t make the super-suit green. Or animated!” This is obviously a joke about Ryan Reynolds’ role as Hal Jordan in Green Lantern (2011), and his infamously fake-looking CGI suit in that movie.

0:37-0:38: Let’s meet our villains. The man in the lab coat is Ajax (Ed Skrein), and the woman dunking Wade’s head in the goop is Angel Dust (Gina Carano). In the comics, Ajax was a mercenary and Weapon X enforcer with a long-standing grudge against Deadpool, and who had his strength, speed, agility, and resistance to pain enhanced by experiments performed on him. It appears that they’re elevating Ajax’s role for the film, making him someone in a position of authority at Weapon X, instead of just someone who works there. Angel Dust in the comics, who can give herself superhuman strength by increasing her adrenaline for a short time, actually has nothing to do with Deadpool or Weapon X; she is instead a member of the Morlocks, a group of mutants who are unable to integrate into human society and live in tunnels under New York.

0:490-0:50: An explosion inside the Weapon X lab. Clearly something’s gone wrong.

0:54-1:00: Our first look at Deadpool in full costume, and he’s sitting on a highway overpass, drawing a picture of himself shooting a guy with crayons, and listening to “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa. The costume looks absolutely spot-on, and I’m impressed by the subtle CGI used to make the “eyes” of his mask more expressive.

1:21-1:29: Faced with a group of gun-toting thugs, Deadpool makes a version of the classic joke about the pirate captain with the red jacket and brown pants.

1:36-1:37: Deadpool gets shot in the arm, and swears loudly as he looks through the bullet hole in his forearm. This kind of tone, what I’d describe as “R-rated Looney Tunes,” feels like exactly the right thing for a Deadpool movie. For anyone who’s wondering, the song that starts up around here is “X Gon’ Give It to Ya” by DMX.

1:44: Although we see more of him later, this is our first look at Weasel (T. J. Miller), Deadpool’s best friend and sidekick. Angel Dust is holding Weasel by the throat, and it’s almost certain that the bald guy in the foreground is Ajax. It’s easy to guess that this is the villains interrogating Weasel in order to find Deadpool.

1:45-1:46: Remember that explosion in the Weapon X lab earlier? This is almost certainly the aftermath of that. The partly-naked guy on the right is Wade, disfigured by the explosion and whatever was done to him beforehand. The other guy is Ajax, and they’re fighting in the burning ruins of the lab, using fire extinguishers as weapons.

1:48-1:49: A sexy moment with Wade and Vanessa. In the comics, Vanessa/Copycat was a prostitute before she met Deadpool, but it looks like she’s instead a stripper in the film. Vanessa has shorter hair here, so this might be a flashback to when she and Wade first met.

1:50-1:51: The big metal guy who backhands Deadpool into the car is Colossus (Andre Tricoteux), a character who previously appeared in X2: X-Men United (2003) and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), but played by a different actor. Colossus is able to transform his body into “organic steel,” giving him superhuman strength, stamina, and durability. Judging by his costume and the “X” on his belt, it looks like Colossus is a member of the X-Men at the time this movie takes place.

1:52: The young woman here is Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), a mutant with the powers of telepathy and precognition.

1:53-1:56: The old woman here is Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), a major supporting character from the comics who lives with Deadpool in “The Deadhut,” his home in San Francisco. The two have a pretty complex and bizarre relationship, with Al – her real name is Althea – being a combination of friend, prisoner, housekeeper, and surrogate mom to Deadpool.

2:07-2:10: This looks like it’s probably the final battle between Deadpool and Ajax, with Ajax wearing body armor and using some kind of axe-swords. Given the warning “Beware Of Jet Blast Propellers And Rotors” on the wall in the background, it looks like they’re on an aircraft carrier. Also, if you look over to the left of the frame, you can see what looks like a woman with dark hair inside a tube like the one Wade was put in back at Weapon X. It seems likely that that’s Vanessa in there, and that might mean that Ajax captures her and plans to turn her into Copycat, essentially.

2:22-2:28: A nice close-up of Deadpool’s mask, which really lets us appreciate the subtle effects used to make his eyes more expressive.

After what they did to Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I had resigned myself to thinking we’d never see this character done well on film. But everything about this movie so far has looked good. And the fact that Fox is letting it be released with an “R” rating has done a lot to reassure me that this will be true to the spirit of the comics. When February rolls around, I’ll definitely be checking out Deadpool for myself.

ANTICIPATION: I give this one two katanas up!