The greatest gift I got for Christmas this year was the new Deadpool trailer. It’s the most gloriously insane thing online. The movie promises to be hilarious. But, it’s also a comic book superhero movie and that means that in addition to the one-liners, the movie needs to bring the action as well. Now the movie’s big bad has spoken out about his big fight scene with our foul-mouthed hero and it looks like they’ve taken inspiration from a great boxing rivalry to make their battle just as entertaining.
Ed Skrein will be playing the role of Ajax. He’s big, he’s tough, and he’s the guy that Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool really, really wants to make dead. When you have one powerhouse, and one wiry guy who can’t keep his mouth shut going toe to toe, you might as well follow in the footsteps of one of the greatest fights in boxing history that put the same types of opponents in the ring. According to Skrein:
Ryan’s like Muhammad Ali, dancing around, whispering in my ear. And I’m George Foreman. Every blow is like a haymaker and I just want to take his head off.
If you are familiar with this classic fight then you can already visualize what the battle will look like. The Foreman-Ali rivalry is famous. Muhammad Ali was a great fighter but he was also a smart mouth. He liked to run his mouth both inside and outside the ring. Sound like a certain hero we know? For his part, Skrein apparently has done his part to embody the power that was George Foreman. According to Reynolds' comments in Entertainment Weekly the man playing Ajax got "yoked" to play the part, so much so that Reynolds felt like he didn’t work out enough.
The most interesting part of the fight may be the "whispering" portion that Skrein mentions. George Foreman has spoken about the famous Rumble in the Jungle fight and one moment where, after he hit Ali with a strong shot to the jaw, Ali whispered in his ear, "That all you got, George?" This is a moment we can completely expect to see coming from Deadpool. The jokes are great, but for the audience, they can also be a weapon, getting inside his enemy’s head so that he’ll start making mistakes in frustration. Honestly, if the merc with a mouth only whispers insults during the battle we’d be shocked. We’d fully expect him to be saying them out loud just in case there’s anybody else around to hear. Now, let’s watch that new trailer again, just because we can.
The action that we’ve seen in Deadpool so far is physical and brutal. We can’t wait to see Deadpool and Ajax go at it at the end of the movie. The trip there looks to be a truly entertaining experience.
