Review: Deadpool 2 (2018)

Deadpool 2 (2018)

Rated R for strong violence and language throughout, sexual references and brief drug material

Score: 4 out of 5

The first Deadpool hit moviegoers and Hollywood like a shit-ton of bricks back in 2016. While films like Super and Kick-Ass had done similarly raunchy and ultra-violent takes on the superhero genre in the recent past, such had never been seen before in a big-budget, major-studio comic book movie attached to one of the big franchises. As such, it was inevitable that we'd see a sequel, and in that regard, the only question was, how was it going to live up to its predecessor? Deadpool was a film made by a studio that had few expectations for it, cutting its budget and releasing it in the dump month of February and maybe expecting a modest-sized hit at best, not the titanic blockbuster and pop culture touchstone that it became. Deadpool 2, on the other hand, is that same studio's big superhero movie for 2018, with nearly double the budget and an ad campaign to match; everybody knows what to expect from this one. Plus, comedy sequels historically have a very poor track record, with even the best of them typically criticized as not living up to their predecessors. How do you capture lightning in a bottle twice?

Having just got back from seeing this with my brother, I am fortunate to report that Deadpool 2 has lost none of its predecessor's charm. It's just as balls-out funny as the first one, the new characters play very well off the returning cast, and having the guy behind John Wick and Atomic Blonde behind the camera means that the action gets a big boost, and while it sometimes ran into problems with mood-whiplash and scenes that could've been cut for time, it manages to retain the human heart that elevated the first movie beyond just a dumb parody. Probably the most sick and twisted movie that a Hollywood studio ever spent more than $100 million on, Deadpool 2 may not be as scrappy as the first, but it's still a really fun flick.

After a surprisingly tragic opening (this is, after all, directed by the guy who killed the dog in John Wick) that sees Wade Wilson, the ex-soldier turned indestructible vigilante superhero Deadpool, try to kill himself (failing because, duh, he can heal), he wakes up in the X-Mansion with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, who try to help him overcome his grief by recruiting him into the X-Men. On his first mission, he's sent to apprehend a fourteen-year-old boy named Russell (or "Firefist", as he insists on calling himself) who has pyrokinetic powers and is trying to kill the staff at his mutant orphanage, but when Wilson learns that Russell and the other children at the orphanage were being abused, things go horribly wrong and both he and Russell get sent to mutant prison. Things go from bad to worse when a man known only as Cable, packing a cybernetic arm and eye and a really big gun, arrives from the future to kill Russell, Terminator-style. Russell, you see, is a supervillain in the making, and Cable, who lost his family to Russell, has traveled back in time to make sure that that doesn't happen -- with extreme prejudice. In order to save Russell from Cable, and find a less violent way to defuse the anger inside him and stop him from turning evil, Wilson breaks out of prison and assembles the X-Force, his own marketing-friendly superhero team ready to carry this franchise for ten to twelve years.

Of the X-Force, while Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are still very welcome presences, the highlight was easily newcomer Zazie Beetz of Atlanta fame as Domino, a young woman whose mutant power is her supernaturally good luck. This film was reshot to add more scenes with her, and I can see why, because she holds her own in both the action and the comedy, an unmistakable presence who would've owned most of the scenes she was in if not for Reynolds himself as the Merc with the Mouth. Josh Brolin's Cable isn't as immediately memorable as his other major superhero character in 2018, Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War (and yes, they do poke fun at that), but that's pretty faint criticism, because he too is excellent as the "straight man", a comically dark, gritty, and ultra-serious anti-hero who often finds himself exasperated or just shaking his head at Wilson's antics. And as for Deadpool himself, the success of the first film seemed to have allowed Ryan Reynolds and the writers a green light to take the character's fourth-wall-breaking, post-modern meta humor that much further, the character making Star-Lord look like Batman when it comes to both the quantity and quality of his humor. Deadpool not only mocks the conventions and logic of the film and the superhero genre as a whole, he exploits them. He does things because he knows that they'll look awesome up on the big screen, he name-drops and makes fun of other superhero movies, and he even delivers barbs at the comic book writer/artist who created him in the comics -- and without spoiling anything, anybody who's witnessed two particularly bad superhero flicks from the last ten years will cheer at the ending. If you've seen the first one, you'll know what you're getting into here, but the jokes still feel as fresh the second time around, a testament to both Reynolds' enthusiastic performance and the quality of the comic writing. By the time the absolutely brutal mid-credits scene came around, I'd already given this movie an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

That, in spite of a story that wasn't as sturdy as I might have liked, with a second act that felt fairly overstuffed. The focus on off-the-wall comic set-pieces kept this movie constantly flowing, but it felt like it came at the expense of narrative tissue, as things rushed by and major story beats weren't given enough time to breathe. Balancing the tone of this film, between a genuinely sincere story about Wilson trying to stop Russell from becoming a murderer and Wilson being Deadpool, is a tricky act, and it's one that the film didn't quite nail all the way through. I found myself experiencing a case of whiplash in the third act once things started getting genuinely heavy, not in the least because it felt like the film didn't really set up something like that. Don't get me wrong, the talent of everybody involved in front of and behind the camera still made it work, but whereas the finale was solid, it could've been a knockout.

The laughs, of course, aren't the only thing this film has going for it. Director David Leitch is probably one of the best action filmmakers working in Hollywood today, and he takes the big budget he has here and uses it to go all-out with plenty of intense, thrilling, and often hilarious shootouts and fistfights. Despite the larger budget, this film didn't lose the more intimate feel of the action in the first one as opposed to the grandiose nature of your usual modern superhero film, a move that worked for the best and played well to both the character's roots in '90s comics and the director's roots in mid-budget action movies. Once more, the R rating is exploited as much for gory violence as it is for raunchy humor, as Wilson puts his katanas to good use fighting bad guys while splattering brains with his pistols; it's no wonder that, when he first sees Cable's big-ass gun, he jumps at the thought of firing it himself. The only weak link in the action comes with some of the CGI, but even there, the scene where it's at its worst is also a downright hilarious demonstration of the utility of Domino's superpower, so I was able to forgive it.

The Bottom Line

It's more Deadpool, so if you liked the first, you'll probably like this one too. Its story is wobbly, but the cast, the action, and the laughs are all high-quality, and if you're getting a bit tired of enormous superhero epics (or still reeling from the end of Infinity War), this makes for a great palate cleanser.