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Critic's Notebook

Ryan Reynolds Finds a Niche, or a Springboard, as a Mouthy Superantihero

Ryan Reynolds, dressed for success as Deadpool.Credit...Joe Lederer/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Recently, I wrote an article accusing the eternal comic-book franchise of killing movie stardom. One can’t coexist with the other. Not forever. But I left something out.

When an actor has tried everything else — romantic comedy, comedy-comedy, vampire action, horror, working with Atom Egoyan, working with Helen Mirren, working with Sandra Bullock, and even a flatulent comic-book movie of his own — and stardom won’t stick, and then another superhero offer miraculously comes along, he should take it. He’d be crazy not to.

Never mind that the part requires an entire body covered in burns. Never mind that the burns mean his costume obscures his musculature and handsome face. He really needs the role, because it’s good business but also because, alas, it’s good shtick. The movie’s sarcasm speaks to him. The sarcasm is him. He says “yes,” shoots the movie and now has a hit on his hands, the biggest of his career — unexpectedly big at that. This is the Ryan Reynolds exception: When an actor has never seemed more like a star than in a superhero movie.

Who knows where Mr. Reynolds would be without “Deadpool”? With it, however, he transforms comic-book stardom. He’s playing the super-antihero of the title, whose whole thing is how much he doesn’t want to be in “Deadpool.” For the most part, he isn’t in it. His voice does a lot of the work. The movie is actually about how it’s too amoral and grisly to stand alongside its peers. Its glib approach to violence is supposed to mock all the hand-wringing that goes on everywhere else in comic-book movie land. But that’s also just an excuse to slice, dice, shoot, impale and blow up stuff.

I liked watching an actor’s gimmick find a home. Mr. Reynolds’s trouble as a star was that he never seemed sincere. In a movie that winks as often as “Deadpool” does, that’s an asset.

Mr. Reynolds gets to traipse through all the mayhem the way Malcolm McDowell did in “A Clockwork Orange,” if Mr. McDowell were dressed, like, in a set of pajamas you’d get at a sex shop. Mr. Reynolds vocalizes his eye-roll and audibly sighs in exasperation. The part isn’t as old as Superman — who has been around since the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration — or Wolverine (since Nixon). Deadpool arrived during the George Bush era.

There’s almost no baggage for an actor to contend with. So for “Deadpool” Mr. Reynolds is free to indulge in the same high-school-detention attitude that made him cool in “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder” and “Blade: Trinity” but left him stranded in toxins like “The Change Up” or “R.I.P.D.”

The limited appeal of the very popular “The Proposal” was in Ms. Bullock’s uptight executive treating him as a dominatrix principal might. His previous attempt at a comic-book movie was “Green Lantern,” whose title character hails from the DC imprint. It was good practice for “Deadpool” because Mr. Reynolds actually didn’t seem to want to be there, either. That was 2011, just before the industry went cuckoo for comic book movies. And “Green Lantern” was instructive for what not to do. For one thing, don’t cast your lot with a single radioactive-looking color scheme. For another, don’t ask a comedic actor to do pious superhero work. It’s as if, when people got a load of Mr. Reynolds’s body, they forgot about his temperament.

That first Wolverine solo movie, “X-Men: Origins: Wolverine,” from 2009, basically did forget Mr. Reynolds. He had a few scenes as Deadpool’s pre-scarred alter ego. At the time it looked like lowly work: The movie belonged to Hugh Jackman, and Liev Schreiber, as his eventual opponent, attempted to steal it. Mr. Reynolds was an afterthought there and a redundancy in general. We’ve got an abundance of stars who can do what Mr. Reynolds can, but with a little more elasticity or humanity or surprise — your Bradley Coopers and Ryan Goslings and Matt Damons. You can always imagine four or five other actors being asked to star in and saying “no” to a lot of roles that get a “yes” from Mr. Reynolds. “Deadpool” feels like it belongs to him.

In the last two years, Mr. Reynolds has turned a corner, though. Playing a tepid lawyer, he was as warmly reserved as Ms. Mirren was strategically haughty in “Woman in Gold,” and playing a gullible gambler in “Mississippi Grind” he made a fine exclamation point alongside Ben Mendelsohn’s slumped question mark. It was a far cry from how overmatched he was in 2012, when Denzel Washington dragged him around “Safe House.” Even in a real fiasco like Mr. Egoyan’s 2014 abduction thriller, “The Captive,” Mr. Reynolds seemed to be working to convince you that the movie was better than it was. He was wasting his time, but the effort he put into that waste kind of moved me.

But now he’s more or less playing the part like a comic-villain feigning exasperation at having to carry a whole movie. If the movie becomes a series that goes on forever, you wonder whether he’ll come to seem as body-snatched as everyone else is in these movies. The obscenity and violence probably limit how far into the rest of the Marvel Universe “Deadpool” can actually expand. The point of the movie is that Mr. Reynolds’s character doesn’t want to join a soul-stealing ensemble. But his exception here makes you eager to find out whether superhero stardom can make him a star in any other universe.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Niche or Springboard for a Mouthy Superhero. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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