I don’t come to a Deadpool movie for the plot. The first film that featured the “Merc with a Mouth” was a hilarious, take-no-prisoners romp when it was poking fun at conventional superhero flicks, and a duller indulgence when it was aping them. The second film dutifully follows in those same, blood-stained footsteps. Deadpool 2 is a blast when its title character is making mischief or joking around and more tedious when it’s trying to wring some pathos out of his otherwise irreverent tale.
There’s a genuine story being told in Deadpool 2 — one of personal loss, the reconstruction of a fractured family, and shared life experiences bringing disparate individuals together. But these are the vegetables you must eat in order to enjoy the sugary desserts that the movie otherwise exists to serve up. The film’s narrative is the plain white rice director David Leitch uses as the necessary conveyance for his cinematic concoction of flamin’ hot cheetos, atomic wings, and donkey sauce.
So while the film musters a cute pairing between Deadpool and a well-rounded, put-upon young man, and sets him on a quest to figure out the meaning of his ultimate “F-word” — family, the real joy if Deadpool 2 emerges when the film acknowledges (often directly through its fourth-wall breaking protagonist) that this is a stock story, one that fits the main character well enough, but which mainly exists to support the gags and action that are Deadpool’s stock and trade, rather than a compelling tale in and of itself.
But the balance of plot-to-irreverence is much better in Deadpool 2 than in the character’s first outing. The movie recaptures the endearing, ribald chemistry between Wade and his girlfriend, Vanessa, but still has trouble mining that relationship for meaning instead of just humor. Beyond an oddly touching acoustic cover of Aha’s “Take On Me,” the film belabors the strained connection between the pair, but thankfully makes it a smaller (if still important) part of the movie.
"Just because we're killers for hire doesn't mean we can't cook with the proper pans."
The same goes for the surrogate dad routine Deadpool puts on for young Firefist, a budding X-man in an abusive hospital for mutants. There’s a lesson buried in their shared story about Wade Wilson genuinely having a heart and hitting rock bottom but bouncing back to empathize and even sacrifice for this kid. But the parts of the film devoted to Deadpool reaching this epiphany are mercifully minimal, largely sidelined in favor of the parts where it’s a means to the character’s Bugs-Bunny-in-spandex routine.
And what a routine! Given the glut of superhero cinema these days, the genre has been aching for a strong spoof to poke fun at its excesses and note the silliness of the whole enterprise. That’s where Deadpool 2 really shines.
The film has plenty of direct references to the other cape flicks du jour. While fighting a towering bad guy, Deadpool spouts the same “sun’s real low” line used to subdue a familiar gargantuan green counterpart. When Cable (Josh Brolin, pulling double duty in comic book movies this summer) offers a grim and gritty riposte, Deadpool wonders aloud if he hails from the D.C. Universe. And between references to specific comic book issue numbers, creators who can’t draw feet, and helmets that “smell like Patrick Stewart,” Deadpool is cheerily intertextual in his reference humor.
There’s also plenty of fourth-wall breaking fun to be had. Wade Wilson may look directly at the camera to note a “big bowl of foreshadowing.” He might poke fun at in-universe rival Wolverine for copying him with R-rated box office success. Deadpool might even note how strange it is that every time he ends up at the Xavier School for Mutants, Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are the only X-Men around.
NTW's "whatever" affect contrasted with her girlfriend's general cheeriness makes for a fun mix.
Sure, some of this is a fairly easy mad-libs book of references that any casual superhero fan would pick up on, mixed together with a few gems for the diehards. But it’s also something no one else is doing on this scale. The fact that we’re getting a superhero spoof on the big screen, set in the X-Men universe, made on a sizeable budget with actors who (as Deadpool himself winkingly notes) have appeared in the likes of Avengers: Infinity War and Green Lantern and plenty of other caped crusaders of varying quality is no small thing.
Deadpool 2 is, even more than its predecessor, an episode of Robot Chicken extended to cinematic length and scale, with the blessing (and more importantly the IP) of a major studio and an intertextual bent to match the film’s self-consciously juvenile stylings. That may or may not be your speed, but it’s a remarkable feat, and offers something no other comic book film on the silver screen has thus far.
That said, the scale works both for and against Deadpool 2. The film’s action scenes are occasionally inventive — with Deadpool’s bullet-slashing moves (which have been spliced into every single trailer for the movie) or his resourceful use of his own broken arm to strangle an opponent — but many are equally hacked to bits in the editing room. For every bit of bloody, slow-motion glory that revels in the cartoony, crimson-splattered violence of the film, there’s three scenes of the same undifferentiated punch-and-kick fest you could find in any mid-to-big budget action flick.
The one consistent exception to this is Deadpool’s new ally, Domino. In addition to having a delightfully blasé attitude and an excellent repartee with Deadpool, this newcomer to the franchise can also boast the best action scenes. Domino’s superpower is luck, and while Wade Wilson may complain about how contrived and uncinematic that is, her ability forces the film’s directors and animators to come up with creative sequences where this conflagration of punches, kicks, and explosions always breaks her way. While other fights in the film suffer from the usual pathology of empty CGI, Domino’s skirmishes always have that extra wrinkle to keep things fresh and interesting.
"Downtown traffic is a nightmare."
That’s Deadpool 2’s M.O. It doesn’t linger on any one thing for too long, moving its plot along while tossing in liberal doses of gallows humor (including a hilarious homage to Suicide Squad), reference humor, potty humor, and other odes to pop culture past and present among various other bits of juvenalia. If one strain of humor isn’t your thing, or a scene isn’t immediately working, then stick around, because the next gag is coming in a hurry.
That’s what I’m after when I go to see a Deadpool movie. Lord knows we have no shortage of options, both recent and classic, for different flavors of superhero films, from the quippy-but-heartrending offerings of the MCU to the grittier trappings of D.C.’s cinematic universe to the varying tones of other X-films. Despite that, the Deadpool franchise is the only one serving up this particular dish, one that’s a mix of outlandish hemoglobin-filled fisticuffs, omnipresent meta humor, and a decidedly unserious take on a genre that the world is increasingly taking more seriously.
Deadpool 2 is not for everyone, and its efforts at an emotional story or poignant moral mainly get in the way of its charms. But when the film is working, it’s unlike anything else in the superhero industrial complex, there to make you laugh and recoil and laugh again at the latest group of men in tights to acknowledge, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, how enjoyably silly this whole thing is.
