Ed Skrein is no stranger to playing villains whose willingness to unflinchingly inflict pain and suffering is so thorough that it veers from cold and unfeeling into outright psychotic; that’s true of his characters in “Alita: Battle Angel,” “Rebel Moon,” and even “If Beale Street Could Talk.” The Skrein villain persona was both codified and literalized in “Deadpool,” with Ajax being presented as a character who literally lost the physical ability to feel, and the emotional ability right alongside it. Although Ajax’s powers are fuzzily defined, we do know that being injected with the serum enhanced his reflexes and scorched his nerve endings, thus ridding him of pain — as well as, presumably, any other tactile sensation.
Once that’s been established, however, the movie basically asks us to just go along with everything Ajax does in the story. Strict immunity to pain can help explain some of his enhanced strength and resistance, since much of the physical limitation to both those attributes in humans stems from the pain of muscular exertion. But it most certainly does not explain how or why he could survive, say, literally having an entire sword driven through his torso, then being run over by a massive container, then tumbling down yards and yards of hard concrete blocks on a collapsed helicarrier. We know Deadpool’s powers allow him to go through that sort of stuff, but Ajax’s powers … well, what even are they, exactly?
