If Quentin Tarantino re-imagined Bugs Bunny as a fourth-wall-bursting, profane, cavalier, heartbroken, mutant mercenary with a death wish, it would look something like Marvel’s latest cinematic offering (through Fox, not Disney) Deadpool.

Ryan Reynolds stars as the titular anti-hero (affectionately dubbed “The Merc with a Mouth”), and he has never been so charming, so lovable, so offensively juvenile, so obscene, or so humane. Reynolds has always been too much of a glimmering, beautiful smart-ass for me, like Johnny Carson on steroids (literally), and, even though he may hold the record for playing different super hero personae (Blade III, the regrettable Green Lantern, and the unforgivable movie Deadpool 1.0 in X-Men Origins: Wolverine), I’ve never really left a film of his without the strong desire to smack him across his smirking, pretty boy mug.

Maybe that’s why I liked this Deadpool so much, which wisely torches any and all Reynolds’ previous super hero work to date in a series of winking inside jokes throughout the film. Screaming irreverence notwithstanding (which I absolutely loved), the film hides Reynolds (and his cheese-tastic visage) under a spectacularly expressive red and black mask (the costumer deserves a medal) or under a football field’s worth of latex scar tissue (when said mask is removed), liberating Reynolds to be the big, sweet, friskily asexual, flaming nerd he’s always desired to be. It suits him beautifully.

The film, which spins out of the decidedly more family-friendly X-Men movie universe, isn’t as unconventional as it purports to be. Yes, Reynolds alongside director Tim Miller (directing his first feature after a career in animation – explaining the Tex Avery influences) freely lampoon and celebrate the super hero genre, gleefully biting the many hands (Marvel, Hollywood, Disney, misogyny, bro-culture) that feed them. However, the film’s chassis is as conventional as they come – yet another comic book origin story where boy meets girl; boy gets terminal cancer; boy abandons girl because he doesn’t want her to see him wither away; boy hooks up with creepy-skid-row-scientists-conducting-sadistic-experiments-in-a-murky-basement-somewhere; boy gets super powers, curing his cancer, but also gets really ugly; boy puts on a super suit to gain revenge on skid row scientists; boy avoids girl ’cause he’s really ugly now, but still lurks around all Phantom of the Opera style; boy beats up the creep who scarred him (literally) with the help of a couple of comically wayward X-Men; boy gets girl back after she punches him repeatedly for ever leaving her in the first place. Finis.

Hmmm … well, maybe the movie is not that conventional. What sets Deadpool apart, ultimately, is how deftly the film marries the prurient and the gentle. The adoration and respect that Reynolds’ Wade Wilson (later Deadpool) shows his fellow lower-class misfit Vanessa (deftly played by Gotham’s Morena Baccarin, lighting up the screen with naughty screwball feminist camp) is genuine and tender (when they aren’t smacking each other with riding crops). The kindness and the mutual admiration Deadpool has for his blind, Ikea-loving, foul-mouthed septuagenarian roommate Blind Al (portrayed with scene-stealing delight by an unrecognizable Leslie Uggams!) is precious and heart-warming (when they aren’t talking about crack cocaine, firearms, and the near-sensual comfort of their Crocs footwear). The sweet and salty bromance between Reynolds and barkeep Weasel (nebbishly scruffy T.J. Miller, used much more effectively here than in that godawful Transformers flick) is a grounded and welcome respite from all the four-color absurdity (when they aren’t starting bar fights by sending alcoholic beverages with risque names from one table of thugs to another).

This film is a hoot and is wildly inappropriate for anyone under 18 or anyone over 18. I applaud the filmmakers for taking on the challenge of an R-rated comic book adaptation, and, while indulging many of their baser instincts, maintaining the sense of joy and inclusion that propels the most successful, broad-reaching super hero films. Deadpool stands in marked contrast to movies like Kingsman or Watchmen or 300 that wear their ugly outcast alienation on their collective sleeves (or, in the case of 300, lack of sleeves … or, in the case of Watchmen, lack of pants), movies with a kind of baked-in, intractable sexism.

I suppose we can thank (?) 300/Watchmen director Zack Snyder (and friends) for creating that new brand of sexism, one in which the purveyors claim that the true sexists are those preoccupied by the sexism? By golly, don’t you dare try to prevent these alpha-aspirational men (?) from being MEN! Grrrr. OK, neither Snyder nor his ilk have ever said that – though films like 300 are really freaking Freudian, in a bad P90X, artisanal craft beer-drinking, Paleo Diet way. Hell, maybe I’ve just had too many wobbly political debates on Facebook this week? #FeelingBernt? But I digress …

Whatever the case, Deadpool is a welcome divergence from those dark and gritty, self-serious comic book adaptations and offers plenty of scatalogical foolishness to satiate your inner 8th grader, while infusing the genre with a truly subversive love for underdogs of any and all stripes (among us all) – and that will satisfy your exhausted outer grown-up.

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Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.