Tim Miller

In Deadpool (2016), Ryan Reynolds talks through the fighting, and we can still follow the blows. That takes care from a director: the movement has to remain clear enough for a violent gag to register. Ken Seng’s cinematography helps Miller keep the physical business readable while Reynolds supplies another interruption. We laughed at the wisecracks because Reynolds’s timing makes the familiar superhero origin feel agreeably improper. This is an enjoyable feature debut with a sensible understanding of what its leading man can do.

Miller came to features through shorts, title sequences and game cinematics, having co-founded Blur Studio in 1995. He followed Deadpool with Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), while also creating the animated anthology Love, Death & Robots (2019–), produced with David Fincher. Secret Level (2024) continued the anthology work, and he has directed episodes of both programmes. The format looks a sensible fit for his interest in adult animation, allowing different directors and styles without asking one tone to sustain a feature.

The less conspicuous decisions in Deadpool matter just as much as the fights. Editor Julian Clarke breaks up the origin story through scrambled chronology, varying the pace without losing the thread. Miller also gets enough affection into the scenes between Reynolds and Morena Baccarin to make Wade and Vanessa worth caring about. That is essential when the rest of the film keeps asking us to laugh at people in costumes. These scenes keep the mockery from making everyone too tiresome to spend an evening with.

Miller is less sure when he treats bad language and gore as jokes in themselves. The wisecracks begin to repeat, and the superhero story follows plenty of the rules it keeps ridiculing. Clear staging cannot make that much fresher, though it does make the film easier to enjoy. We would start with Deadpool for Reynolds and Baccarin, provided a steady supply of wisecracks sounds appealing.