Hey guys!
This video is a little different from the usual, given I’m not talking about Venice
and I’m back here in the library room.
That's because this video is about movies, and we’re gonna be talking about one marvelous
scene from Deadpool.
You might have seen something like this last year, where our friend Nando v Movies assembled
a whole bunch of youtubers to dish on the best scenes in the MCU.
And this is the same idea, but with the X-Men movies!
So once you wrap up here, take a peruse through this playlist to watch some other great videos
— Red’s got a breakdown on Magneto’s most gut-punching scene in First Class, and
our pal Hello Future Me is diving into another scene from the same movie.
So uh, if you like First Class then you’re in luck!
So, to appreciate the best scene in 2016’s Deadpool, let's do some cinema!
Now, to make sure this video doesn’t get too off-track from my usual fare, we’re
going to start out with a little history of the character.
Deadpool was created by Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza in 1991 and immediately went off the
rails.
Because his original concept art looked a lot like Slade Wilson, his writers figured
the appropriate course of action was to make Deadpool’s real name Wade Wilson, and things
only got more irreverent from there.
Soon enough, Deadpool’s nonstop snarking and asinine wisecracks earned him the nickname
of “The Merc With A Mouth”, and before long our boy became self-aware and started
breaking the 4th wall.
So with that established, let’s wind our clocks to a distant era, beyond anything I’ve
covered on this channel: 2009.
Now, I personally had never seen the X-Men movies as a kiddo —in fact, my favorite
superhero movie was Spiderman 3 because I saw it at 11 and I’m a tasteless scrublord.
But, point being, my first experience with the X-Men movies was Wolverine, (I know, not
better) where Deadpool was first brought to life on screen, as this.
This thing was Deadpool in name only, and most people would sooner describe it as “Hot
Garbàge”.
But behind this mess of CGI and broken dreams was a gem of a man, Canada’s National Treasure
Ryan Reynolds.
And the thing is, earlier in the movie we did get a little taste of what this character
is supposed to be.
He’s funny, he’s irreverent, and he’s cutting bullets in half with the power of
cartoon logic.
This was so clearly on the right track but still so woefully Not Deadpool, and this seemed
to convince 20th Century Fox to store all talk of future Deadpool content at the bottom
of the Challenger Deep.
[3] Fast forward to mid 2014, and a two-minute clip leaks online.
It’s rough CGI —albeit no rougher than the other deadpool —and it appears to be
test-footage from months or years earlier of a potential Deadpool movie, again with
Ryan Reynolds.
This is the kind of footage that gets mocked up when a studio is deciding whether to make
a movie or not, and they need to test out what it’ll actually look like.
For Marvel’s Ant Man, the footage was testing the visual mechanics of Dude Who Goes Small
And Gets Big Again.
But in Deadpool’s case, the focus wasn’t testing mechanics or an art style, it was
testing Character.
Now, this being an unauthorized leak of Fox’s precious intellectual property, they start
ripping it off of websites as fast as humanly possible to stop people from seeing the unfinished
footage.
But in no time flat people were all over this, so movie channels and social media started
excitedly talking about this secret stash of Good Deadpool Movie that had been hidden
all these years.
Before this footage dropped, nobody had ever dreamed of Fox daring to make a Deadpool movie
after the monumental flop of Wolverine, but suddenly everybody could picture exactly what
a full, awesome Deadpool movie would be like, just from this little clip.
So let’s walk through what’s actually happening here.
The clip opens on Deadpool, sitting on a bridge, doodling to the lyrical stylings of Gwen Stefani
as all winners do, talking straight to the camera through an animated mask with zero
pretense of a 4th wall.
Immediately it’s clear that this is not the same character established by the Wolverine
movie.
After this intro, he jumps down through the sunroof of a moving car, starts speaking Spanish
as if he’s in a telenovela, and proceeds to demolish everybody inside while joking
mercilessly and not giving a care in the world.
The ultimate action shot comes as the car is cartwheeling through the air towards one
of the baddies in slow motion, and Deadpool shows off the fruits his earlier doodling,
which is him cutting the mook’s head off, and then it ends with him cracking more jokes
to camera while yoricking with the newly-decapitated mook.
And it’s not hard to see why this scene made such a splash, as if gracefully crashing
through the sunroof of a moving SUV.
This came just after the Dark Knight trilogy wrapped up, and right in the middle of MCU
Phase 2.
So just when it seemed that the only three styles of making a superhero movie were Christopher
Nolan, Joss Whedon, and Yikes, here was a breath of fresh air in the comicbook movie
world that everybody wanted.
So in a rare display of good sense, Fox listened to the popular discourse (and the fervent
pleas of Ryan Reynolds who maybe probably leaked the footage) and greenlit the project.
Two years later we got the hilarious treasure of a Deadpool movie we all know and love,
and in an uncommon but ultimately unsurprising twist, that very test scene became nearly
the opening sequence of the movie.
So after we got a few glimpses of the fancy and remastered version of this scene in the
movie’s trailer — which, by the way, exquisite matching of action to music — let’s now
take a look at the final piece.
It starts, auspiciously enough, with Deadpool in disbelief over the fact that his movie
is real, but truly only a character like Deadpool could will his own film into existence.
After our favorite merc interrupts a perfectly innocent jam session of Angel of the Morning,
the fight choreography is similar but much more complex and more physically comedic in
this version — Deadpool is crawling around the car with all the energy and vigor of a
toddler in a playpen, but with way more bodily harm being inflicted.
And there’s nobody else in comics who fights like this, it’s the simultaneous peak of
slapstick comedy and visceral brutality, there’s a violent irreverent glee to the way Deadpool
beats people up.
Then there’s some more fighting and a joke that would not fly in a PG-13 rated movie,
oh yeah, did I blow past how they got clearance for an R-Rated movie?
It’s a testament to the team assembling this movie that they knew an R-rating was
necessary for authentic Deadpool, and that the success of the original test footage gave
them the carte blanche to actually make it happen.
Finally, all the action culminates in a freeze-frame of pure wound-up chaos that explodes in a
gory mess all over the highway, and the scene ends.
So now that I’ve explained this at you, let’s talk about precisely why it works
so well.
The first reason is great action.
The space in which the fight happens is extremely simple and easy to keep track of, just the
inside of a car, but the choreography makes full use of that space, from the sunroof to
the seatbelts and doors to the pedals, steering wheel, and even the cigarette lighter.
It’s not just some dudes punching at each other on a boring rooftop cough cough Batman,
this is interesting because the choreography of the fight is intricately linked to the
space they’re in.
It’s similar to why Jackie Chan fights are so exciting to watch.
And whereas a lot of movie fights can be complicated to visually follow, Deadpool makes it easier
for us by using its title card to show the end result of all this carnage, so that we
as viewers can follow each beat of the fight with an understanding of what it’s building
towards.
It’s a zoomed-out case of Setup-Payoff, and it’s no accident that this visual gag
is also in service to the fight choreography.
Just like in Jackie Chan movies, action is intricately linked with comedy via a series
of setups and payoffs, or setups and punchlines.
It’s a rules-based system.
Action without setup is just people hitting each other, and comedy without setup is just
empty quips.
And where Deadpool thrives in particular is in Setup-Callback-Subversion, where an action
or a comedic rule is first established and then deliberately broken to have a greater
effect.
Rules and clear information are so important because they lift the audience up from passively
viewing a scene to actively engaging with it.
So that’s what makes the fight cool, but the fight is also so fun because the movie
dumps a gallon of cartoon logic into the mix.
Deadpool isn’t winning because he’s stronger than the baddies, but because he’s using
Bugs Bunny physics.
Forget super strength or a healing factor, nothing short of being the protagonist could
make Deadpool land that sunroof jump.
And in another case of effective Setup, the cartooniness of the movie is conveyed through
Deadpool’s eyes.
Both Deadpool and Spiderman are known for wearing masks yet being fantastically expressive
through the movements of their mask-eye-thingies.
For spiderman, this was actually a big hindrance to his first two outings, but for his appearance
in the MCU, they made sure to justify his articulating, spider-sense-dampening, eye-lens
shutter things so that they could make Spiderman express emotion through his eyes without breaking
the logic of the world.
But Deadpool says F*ck all that, the eyes just move, because it’s funnier that way.
And from the second we see Deadpool, his eyes convey that cartooniness to us, even if we
don’t realize it’s because his mask is impossibly articulating like a human face.
Jumping back to jumping through sunroofs, point number 3 is sound.
Deadpool is always talking, singing, and yelping throughout the fight, and the use of music
makes for hilarious juxtaposition for moments like the rising tension of the highway jump
cutting to Angel of the Morning before the smash of shattering glass makes all hell break
loose, or when everything fades out and slows to a pause for Deadpool’s stove joke and
then comes violently careening back to full volume.
Another point for the comedic brilliance of this scene, which goes hand in hand with the
cartoon slapstick, is that Deadpool demonstrates zero regard for his personal safety.
Maybe it’s something about having a healing factor and being functionally immortal, but
he allows himself to get beaten up for comedy at multiple points.
If he was just Cool Guy McSwordsandGuns the scene would eventually get dull, but Deadpool’s
complete lack of concern for the situation around him is strangely charming.
And of course all of these great qualities about the scene are in service to one thing
above all else, and that’s Characterization.
From the animated mask and 4th wall breaking to the cartoonish irreverence and slapstick
brutality, everything about this scene conveys the pure, unfiltered essence of Deadpool.
There’s no other character who could glue all these disparate elements together in such
an entertaining way.
The test footage sold people on Deadpool in two minutes flat, and the final scene atypically
cribbed a lot of those same elements because it worked so damn well, so it can rope people
in to what makes Deadpool Deadpool in the first minutes of the movie.
This scene is a testament to how strong characterization can not only carry a film, but can literally
will it into existence.
The character we got in Wolverine was so jarring and, well, bad, because it wasn’t Deadpool
in any meaningful way — But it may well be because that first outing was so disastrous
that Reynolds and crew went all in on pure Deadpool, and it worked.
Not just this scene, but the whole entire movie, worked specifically because it was
so bold and so Deadpool.
Let that serve as a lesson for any big Hollywood blockbusters you might be working on in your
free time: focus on character and use every tool in your arsenal to highlight what makes
them so great.
And that’s my take on this X-cellent scene.
If you enjoyed that, check out some of the other videos in the playlist, and have a wonderful
day!