Despite this, Ryan Reynolds is back as the wise-cracking, gun-toting, hyperviolent mercenary with a penchant for one-liners, having pledged to do the character justice the second time around. It’s fair to say that he manages it. Probably the best praise you can give this movie is that it completely translates the appeal of Deadpool to the screen, and if you’ve got even a passing fondness for the character’s brand of comedy then you’ll have a grin plastered over your face for the whole running time. In terms of the existing superhero movies, it most closely resembles Kick-Ass, which probably comes as no surprise to fans of both properties. It goes considerably further with its sexual content than that movie does and it’s a lot less sentimental even at its emotional heights, but it’s trope-aware, super-flippant and pumps out an unconventionally pop-heavy soundtrack over its action in a way that makes it music-video cool. Perhaps the strangest thing about the film is quite how heavy on X-Men content it is. You’re expected to be franchise-literate before you see the movie in more ways than one. Comics fans will delight at the inclusion of one very accurate-looking character, even if he is there as a straight-man punchline for Deadpool. For me, the very best part of the movie was when they showed Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s costume, which is as close to a trainee X-Men uniform as we’ve seen. The fact that these things are in the film show that it’s being made by people who care about the details of their adaptation, and with that comes a Marvel Studios-style helping of goodwill. The problem with a movie that has so much thrown into it, tonally and narratively, is that some stuff just doesn’t land. It takes a while to find its feet with the narration and fourth-wall breaking humour, and the complex structure hides the fact that the plot is paper-thin. There’s enough going on that you can forgive some of its weaknesses, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re there. The one area where the movie falls short is in its characters. Wade says becoming Deadpool changed him, but there’s no line between him before and after the procedure that turns him into Deadpool. His girlfriend, Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa, is like fresh air as far as superhero love interest archetypes go, but she’s still stuck in that framework and has little in the way of an interior life. The villain, Ajax, is charismatic but uninteresting. Were it not for his accent, there wouldn’t be a single memorable quality to him. Yet in a strange way, Deadpool is actually less subversive than it suggests. For all the character’s talk of being a villain, he’s still someone you root for. He says he’s not a hero, but he does heroic things, and he follows a heroic arc. As a character he’s not immune to romantic attachment, but the film makes it his driving force in a way it isn’t in the comics. The movie’s a blast, but it lets itself down at times, to the point where we can’t quite recommend it unreservedly. The one thing we can say is that Deadpool fans will love it – and it’s going to make a whole lot more of them. Deadpool is out in UK cinemas on the 10th February.