Deadpool 2, like its predecessor, is an exercise in contemporary superhero meta-awareness that ultimately is too similar to what it mocks to ever work. What works is the jokes, many of which are funny and move by at such a fast clip that the humor feels more like an action sequence.
Recall that Wade Wilson\Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) had mad scientists endow him with superhuman healing abilities. He can’t be killed, a burden that is better explored in this sequel. Since the first film, Wade has made a living being a contract killer who, we see in montage, travels the world clipping bad guys. His home life with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is still idyllic. In the tiresome shock-jock fashion that characterizes these films, she presents to Wade her intrauterine device as an anniversary gift. They want to have a baby.
When tragedy strikes, Wade is bent on revenge. That alone is enough for a good story. After all, director David Leitch, a former stunt double with a flair for vigorous action sequences, was part of the creative team responsible for John Wick. Of course, this is a Marvel product. Thus we’re bombarded with callbacks, loose ends being tied, cameos, and, in the case of Deadpool, an unending series of pop culture references hurled at the audience like impossible fastballs.
Even amid the laughs, it created a feeling of hopelessness in me. Does Deadpool 2 even need an audience to exist? It has the quality of a Rube-Goldberg machine designed for bringing about first-weekend box office returns.
In his quest for revenge, Wade again teams up with X-Men members Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Stefan Kapičić and Brianna Hildebrand), accompanying them on a mission to intervene in what is essentially a superhero version of a school shooting involving Firefist (Julian Dennison from The Hunt for the Wilderpeople). The kid is being hunted by Cable (Josh Brolin) a superhero soldier “from the future” in a John Conner/T-1000 situation. In between dick jokes, our heart strings are clawed at with shameless aggression.
Moreover, characters that are established as important, such as Juggernaut and someone named Black Tom Cassidy, seem to have melted in the background in the editing bay. A fantastic character named Domino, played by the equally fantastic Zazie Beetz, has an actually-quite-interesting superpower: she is lucky. But her role seems curtailed.
The constant meta-textual jokes and literal winking at the camera is more watchable that the goofy sentimentalism that the film, despite itself, seems to want us to take seriously. Wade must learn to get “his heart in the right place.” There are sentimentalist moments during which one is waiting for a joke to come, and it never does. The rest of the time, the adolescent joking never stops.
In fact, the comedy is what works best here. There is an excellent comedic scene in the middle of the film that uses all our major characters and, notably, relies more on staging and well-timed sight gags with reaction shots than on wisecracks and references to Say Anything.
The ending, with its insistence on fake-outs and false promises about the peril a superhero might actually face, brought to mind last month’s Infinity War. We’re involved in a story that moves inevitably toward a particular resolution, only to find that the either/or scenario of the central conflict cheats its way into a third option that preserves our team for the next film.
What’s disappointing about Deadpool 2 is that it didn’t need to be this way. It’s the one franchise under the Marvel umbrella that’s given itself a permission slip to be truly different, yet it resigns itself to the familiar.
Deadpool 2 — TWO STARS
Directed by David Leitch
Rated R
Marvel Studios
Twentieth Century Fox
119 min.
Lewis On Film 