Yesterday I pulled a Forest Gump. I went out for a quick jog and then just… kept going. And going and going. Until I ended up at some place called Tito’s Tapas. I met a young lady there named Margo and we spent the next three hours discussing Euler’s Equation. We came to the conclusion that the answer was 12. I then hitched a ride back home in a shared-ride Uber that ran out of gas in West Hollywood. So I bought an Astro Burger, took the bus home, and promptly fell asleep for the next five hours. Which is why I don’t have a fresh review for you today. Instead, I’ll share with you a review from my newsletter (sign up here!). Hope you enjoy!
Genre: Comic-Book/Action
Premise: After an evil gangster tortures and maims an innocent man, that man turns into a fast-talking psychotic superhero who will stop at nothing to get his revenge.
About: Hollywood works in mysterious ways. Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick lit the world on fire with their unexpected hit, Zombieland. All of a sudden, everyone associated with that film was the hottest thing in town. But after an ill-advised trip into the G.I. Joe franchise and a failed attempt at turning Zombieland into a TV show, Reese and Wernick found themselves right back where they started: desperate for Hollywood’s attention. Here’s where things get funny. After Zombieland, Reese and Wernick wrote Deadpool, an off-beat superhero script that quickly became one of the most beloved scripts in Hollywood. But writing something everyone loves and writing something that a studio wants to plunk down 150 million dollars for are two different things, and after doing some test footage, 20th Century Fox deemed the material too off-kilter, effectively killing the project. Then, five years later, that test footage leaked online and quickly became persona geek grata, with thousands of online chants that all said the same thing: “Why the hell aren’t they making this movie???” In the five years since the script was written, super-hero films had become the prom king of genres. And it just so happened, studios were now looking for new angles into the genre (remember what I was talking about yesterday? Angles!). Dare I say they were looking for superhero movies that were a little… off-kilter. So Fox grabbed box office mysterioso Ryan Reynolds to play the lead and Deadpool was off to the races.
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Details: 112 pages (April 12, 2010 draft)
I’d always been curious about this screenplay because whenever the topic of “best unmade screenplays” came up, Deadpool was mentioned.
Now the history of “best unmade screenplays” is a funny one. Before Scriptshadow, there were about 30 scripts over the last 30 years that you’d always hear were “the best unmade screenplays in Hollywood.” These scripts had taken on an almost mythical status, and I was desperate to get my hands on them.
But what I quickly found was that the scripts weren’t all that good. They had a good scene here and some interesting ideas there, but as entire screenplays, you could clearly see why they were never made.
Like that famous script, The Tourist. That screenplay was an idea-machine but it read like a B-movie version of a bad David Lynch film. It just wasn’t good at all. And I realized that a lot of these scripts were propped up by the mere fact that no one could read them.
It’s like hearing about those playground basketball legends from the 70s. In 1979, Bats Jackson scored 55 points in one game. Ten years later, people recall that it was 75 points. By 2015, he’d scored 130 points and performed a triple back flip slam dunk and rode off on a triceratops.
Point being, it’s a lot harder to write a “best unproduced script in Hollywood” these days. Too many people have access to the scripts and therefore, can sniff out the bullshit.
Deadpool was one of the few scripts that seemed to survive this internet-age scrutiny. So I wanted to see how it fared.
Wade Wilson is an angry dude. And he has a right to be. He has to wear a suit and mask wherever he goes because he’s been burned, maimed, and mutilated to the point where even catching him in your peripheral vision would send you vomiting into the nearest storm drain.
We meet Wade (as his alter-ego, Deadpool) slamming into a car going after some guy named Francis, a local bigshot gangster who’s just been released from prison after ten years. As Deadpool tells us (in his ongoing voice over), he’s been waiting for this day forever. Finally, he gets to do to Francis what Francis did to him.
What did Francis do to him? Well, many years ago Francis chained him into his own little personal torture bay, and constructed a series of machines designed to torture Wade as much as a person can possibly be tortured without dying. Remember the Pit of Despair in The Princess Bride. It’s like that times a billion.
Francis even created the perfect torture device. A water tank that would drown Wade, but then, as soon as Wade was about to pass out, pump oxygen into him to keep him conscious, so he could go right back to drowning again, until the point where Wade was about to go unconscious, where he would pump more oxygen into him again, repeating that process for… OVER A YEAR.
So when we jump back to the present and Wade learns things like he’s been diagnosed with cancer, you understand why he’s not that phased. This man has been through way way worse.
The script essentially uses a parallel timeline structure where we follow Wade in the present as he goes after Francis and then cuts back to the past, where we see Francis enslaving Wade. We also see how Wade met the love of his life (Vanessa the hooker) and eventually transformed into his alter ego, Deadpool. Will Deadpool finally get Francis? The script’s online in plenty of places if you want to find out.
So why is this script so admired? Well, it’s got a lot of geek-friendly things going for it. The story itself is actually very simple. This isn’t Avengers where superheroes are trying to save the world. This is a revenge story. A guy wants to kill the guy who maimed him.
But it’s the way the story is told and the flash in its delivery that makes it stand out. Reese and Wernick knew if they told this simplistic story linearly, it would induce mass sleepage. Much better to introduce a mystery in the present (why does Deadpool want to kill this dude so badly??) and dole out hints to said mystery throughout the flashbacks.
The script is also very self-aware. Wade plays with an action figure of himself from one of the Wolverine movies, is absolutely infatuated with Hugh Jackman, collects Deadpool comic books, and at one point, even watches the first act of his own movie (yes, this movie) in his apartment.
The script is ruthless in its violence (note the drowning torture device I mentioned earlier), has an ongoing commentary track in the form of Wade’s comedic voice over, and does things that you just don’t see in superhero movies. For instance, we get a hardcore fucking scene with a superhero.
And then there are things that are just… weird. And that’s good. Like I always say, you have to take some chances with your screenplay. If you’re playing it straight down the middle, expect to see a lot of bored faces staring back at you.
Here we have Deadpool sawing his arm off in one scene and then that same arm growing back later. What?? Deadpool also casually hangs out with Colossus, an 8-foot tall man made out of pure steel. Which would seem normal in a superhero movie except for the fact that everybody else in this story is a flesh and blood person.
Couple all this with some balls-to-the-wall action starring a superhero who uses katana blades to dismember evil villains, and you get the kind of thing that 16 year-olds like to brag that they snuck into. It basically checks all the boxes on the geek checklist.
And yet…
Something was missing. I think all these devices are fun but if there isn’t an authentic core to the movie, if all it is is a bunch of wackiness, then how do you connect to it? How do you care? That’s what I kept waiting for. To care.
There’s something to be said for being relatable. If an audience relates to a character or his situation or his problems or his flaws, they’re much more likely to care what happens to him. Deadpool’s issues were so unique to his particular predicament (being tortured for no reason) that even though the man was dished out some extreme injustice, I didn’t really care if he succeeded in his revenge or not.
And also, the scope of the story bothered me. I don’t know if I’ve been conditioned in superhero movies to expect a goal with some actual consequences, but the fact that Deadpool ONLY wanted to get this one little tiny bad guy made this all feel so small. I didn’t feel like the story mattered enough.
I can admire this screenplay but it’s so jokey, so meta, so focused on the external rather than the internal, that that’s all I could do, is admire it. I never felt it. And that’s what kept this from being great. Still, this is worth the read just for how nuts it is.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you have a really really simple story, like here, a man trying to enact revenge, consider infusing an offbeat structure into your screenplay. Offbeat structures can KILL a complex storyline (you don’t want to make something that’s complex even more complex). But for simple plots, they’re perfect. Here, we jump back and forth between the past and the present, using the flashbacks to inform the audience on how we got to this point of our hero wanting to kill our villain.
