#deadpool 2

The main draw of Deadpool is the humor, and this film knocks it out of the park. I was laughing out loud pretty frequently due to both the verbal and the visual comedy. My favorite general gag is how Domino uses her luck powers. Everytime she’s on screen something hilarious happens. Her fight in the orphanage and all the bad guys killing each other is great, but the highlight is her hijacking the train. It’s all the random things that cascade into being helpful, like her throwing a guy out the window to make the side mirror start spinning and then that temporarily blinds Cable and makes him miss. It’s an excellent showcase of luck powers, being both awesome and delightful to watch. I’m still mixed on the infamous X-Force genocide sequence, but the whole thing does make Domino’s bit way funnier. Her guessing the passcode at the end and it just being “7” is also a really good bit. 

Some of the my other favorite jokes include everybody pointing guns at Cable and Blind Al not only reacting late but also pointing in the wrong direction, Deadpool bitches about there being no X-Men and then they shut themselves in a room to avoid him, and Yukio and Deadpool just cheerily greeting each other, and Deadpool ignoring the entire plot to ask Cable if dubstep is still a thing.

Not all of the humor lands, unfortunately. If the first film had an overreliance on sex jokes, this one was an overreliance on reference humor. I personally find many of the references funny, but the film does occasionally go too far and reference the same thing two or three times. Once you make the reference once, it stops being funny, because part of why it’s funny is that the reference is even being made in the first place.

The action is also on point in this movie. The fight scenes are very dynamic, and make far better use of Deadpool’s powers. Cable’s and Firefist’s abilities also make things more interesting than just guys with guns and swords, allowing things to feel far more intense. I don’t think any of the fight scenes top the bullet counting fight from the first movie, but they’re far better on average. The two Domino fights come close, especially the first one when you’re not quite expecting it yet. The weakest fight is probably the Colossus/Juggernaut fight because you can just feel that the characters aren’t real, but the ending to the fight being electrocuting Juggernaut in a pool is pretty funny.

The big thing that sets this movie apart from the first one is the characters and story. This film juggles a lot of characters and it leaves a handful of them underdeveloped, mostly the returning bit characters from Deadpool 1. Negasonic Teenage Warhead in particular adds almost nothing aside from a few good lines and the “Hi Yukio” bit. The rest of the cast also doesn’t have a lot going on, but they have just enough going on to do what they need to do, whether that’s add to the story like Cable and Russell, add to the fight scenes like Domino and Juggernaut, or just be really funny like Dopinder.

The film’s themes and central character conflict are a bit more complex than in the first movie, centering around Deadpool trying to find meaning now that Vanessa is gone and there’s nobody for him to get revenge on. Russell and Cable are in a similar place, with Cable trying to get vengeance for the torture he suffered, and Cable trying to get revenge for his own dead family. While Deadpool gets depressed, Russell becomes a violent terrorist, and Cable does everything he can to get his family back. The three fall down different paths, but end up at the same solution: you can’t get back what you lost, but you can still find meaning with the others who care about you. Of course, Deadpool does get Vanessa back, and Cable could have reunited with his family, but we don’t have time travel in real life, so eh.

The story still isn’t perfect. Killing Vanessa is certainly a decision, but Deadpool’s entire character is centered around her death so it doesn’t quite feel like fridging. Deadpool still tries to kill himself to the last, though, and only decides to keep living because Cable forces him too. He does find a reason to live, but he still immediately brings Vanessa back. I don’t blame him, but it does make it seem like Deadpool never really resolves his internal conflict. The first movie is similar, so this may just be a theme with this franchise. 

Alongside Deadpool trying to kill himself, the film is all about what it means to do the right thing, and it never really answers that. Deadpool trying to kill Russell’s torturers in public is what leads to Russell becoming Firefist in the first place, and him killing all the criminals is what leads to Vanessa’s death. The movie also treats Cable trying to kill Russell as wrong, so the implication is that while bad guys need to be stopped, it’s better to talk them down than to just commit murder. That said, Dopinder still kills the guy who tortured Firefist and everybody’s chill with it, and the first movie is all about how it’s okay to kill people who deserve it. Deadpool isn’t supposed to be the best guy, but if he is a bad guy and murder is so wrong, then the X-Men are weirdly okay with it. That said, the other X-Men do shun Deadpool, so maybe Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are also towing the line of heroism. 

I haven’t really talked about these movies as part of the X-Men franchise, and that’s because it doesn’t really matter. The X-Men are used as this idea of heroism that is more important to this movie than the first, but it doesn’t use any of the characters or plots from the main films. Instead, they use the franchise as a setting to have this heroic group and wacky mutant powers. This film makes better use of those powers than the first one, but I think both do benefit from assuming that audiences know and accept that superhumans live in this world.