To do Deadpool right, the movie needs to be: funny, vulgar, and violent.

I think it hits all the marks. "Funny" is the hard one. As a general rule, most movies aren't funny. But Deadpool makes it. The lines where he makes fun of himself or superhero movies or the studio all basically work. I laugh. The opening credits are great. Nails the music, the credits themselves, the imagery. And the opening credits do what is often hard to do. They have a joke and continue building it for a couple minutes. And even after you get it, it's still funny. Because they're twisting it just enough, just ahead of your processing of these credits.

The closing credits and after-credits scene also quite funny.

Reynolds earns it all. He is perfect in this, his 4th attempt at a superhero movie. He failed miserably as Hannibal King and then as Deadpool and then egregiously as Green Lantern. But redeems himself as Deadpool.

The movie features massive tonal shifts, but they work simply because the character takes a minute to explain to the audience that a tonal shift is happening. When the movie is about to spend a lot of time having kinky sex in humorous and oddly charming ways, Deadpool tells us this is really a love story. When the tone shifts massively, and the humor disappears to be replaced by some dark torture, Deadpool kindly tells the audience we are now watching a horror film.

It all basically works. The first hour or so of the film is a single action scene on a freeway driven by mayhem, humor and flashbacks with love or horror as appropriate.

It is unfortunate that the film had a plot. This is certainly its weakness. The plot is fine as long as Deadpool is remembering to make fun of the plot as it goes along. "There's a guy here to see you. May advance the plot." But sometimes they forget to make fun of it and get a little lost in the idea that somebody might care about their entirely boring final fight between Deadpool and some British dude for its own sake. But it's a small part of a mostly pretty great film.

Deadpool, for those who don't know, was originally conceived as basically a blank slate for a character, introduced in an issue of New Mutants in 1991 that is basically about as bad as any comic as ever been. Drawn by the simultaneously most successful while least talented creator in the medium's history since Bob Kane, without anything resembling what one might call a story, introducing 3 new X-Men characters nobody could possibly ever care about.

One of whom was a recolored version of DC's Slade Wilson, Deathstroke. Except that they changed the name Slade to Wade. (The talentless hack who created Deadpool claims Deathstroke was not an inspiration, but rather that he was envisioning a Spider-Man who kills people.)

But, as can happen with ciphers passed off as characters, later writers can build something into him. Mark Waid added a bit of pathos. Joe Kelly decided to make him actually funny, and 4th-wall breaking. And over the years and through many hands of various talents, Deadpool got transformed from a character who was worth nothing whatsoever to a multiple personality, cancer-ridden, wisecracking, 4th-wall breaking, murderous sometimes hero.

Which brings us to today, 25 years after a talentless hack made a 2nd-grade level drawing of a guy in a red suit shooting people, we get a pretty awesome superhero film, poking fun at a genre which has been dominating studio blockbusters this decade and the last.

Everybody should go watch it.

Except for kids. They should probably stay home.