directed by David Leitch
written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds
After the relatively micro-budgeted, ultraviolent superhero...errr...superantihero movie Deadpool managed to make nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in global box office (without China!) two years ago, a sequel was all but guaranteed. It was guaranteed that they would come back with a bigger budget, more violence and even more superhero-movie lampooning than you could shake a bundle of MAD magazines at.
What wasn't entirely expected was that the sequel a movie so fond of skewering narrative cliches would turn up with quite a few of its own.
After the events of the first movie, Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, gamely donning the red tights and human raisin makeup again), spends his days gleefully killing the scum of the earth such as human traffickers and his nights romancing the love his life Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), who wants to start a family with him.
When tragedy strikes (more on that in a minute) Wade finds himself in a funk, but the X-Man Colossus (Stefan Kapicic and a lot of really bad CGI) isn't about to let him lie around feeling sorry for himself; he tries (again) to recruit him for the X-Men, and their first mission is to rescue a young mutant, Russell Collins (Julian Dennison) an orphan who is currently in a standoff with the police. When Deadpool learns that Russell has been suffering abuse at the hands of his caregivers, including the headmaster (Eddie Marsan), he reacts violently and as a result both he and Russell are sent to a prison for mutants known as the "Ice Box." While they are there, the prison is invaded by the time-traveling cyborg Cable (Josh Brolin) whose sole mission is to kill Russell, who only just escapes with his life as Deadpool takes on Cable. Deadpool then finds new purpose in his life: to save that of Russell, and recruits a whole crew of super-powered people, including mutants Bedlam (Terry Crews), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgaard), Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Vanisher (it's a surprise!), Domino (Zazie Beetz) and the non-super-powered Peter (Rob Delaney) whom he dubs "X-Force" to help him in his newly-adopted mission. But Cable, whose grudge against the future version of Russell is deeply personal, will be extremely tough to stop.
It's hard to elaborate on how I feel about this movie without going into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that in their efforts to put more "heart" into the movie, the film's writers have become guilty of some of the very cliches they ridicule. That said, the movie has plenty of the things made its predecessor enjoyable, most notably the humor, though a lot of the gags feel like retreads of old jokes, like the severed/regenerating hand joke from the first movie, which gets a somewhat more disturbing update for this edition. I found one particular series of jokes particularly enjoyable but I won't spoil it for anyone.
As for the action, this film is a bit like last year's John Wick 2 in that there was really only so much neck-snapping, bullet-riddling wanton murder, I could watch before I started feeling a little queasy. Violence porn was never really my thing, and nowadays, even less so with school shootings in the United States becoming a startlingly regular thing and extra-judicial killings here on my home soil continuing almost unabated. Additionally disappointing was the fact that Leitch, who, with John Wick co-director Chad Stahelski actually started reintroducing well-choreographed, well-shot fight sequences into action movies, is surprisingly guilty of the rapid-cut editing style that obscures actual fighting and which has been a bane on action cinema since Paul Greengrass popularized it over ten years ago with the Bourne movies. I would not have expected this from a champion of old-school movie fighting like Leitch. It's not nearly as bad as the Taken movies, but definitely not up to John Wick standards.
The good news is that the film is pretty solid on the acting front; Reynolds is still as charming in the role as ever, and new additions to the cast Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz and Josh Brolin turn in some truly entertaining performances, with Beetz being the standout for me, even though Brolin's obviously the most high-profile addition to the cast. There are a couple of hilarious cameos that help spice things up. Overall, despite its flaws and the inevitable pitfalls of being a sequel, the film still manages to entertain.
I just hope they use a little more imagination next time around.
6.5/10
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