SPOILER ALERT for Deadpool 2.
Last chance to back away...
Okay, here we go.
Deadpool 2 is not a movie that relies on twists for its narrative. It's a straight-up action comedy that is practically predictable by design and doesn't really go for any emotional punches, nor does it particularly mess with its audience. In short, it doesn't really go for any of the usual beats that characterize a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, almost as if to emphasize just how different Deadpool is from his estranged cousins at Disney.
One thing this movie does traffic quite a bit in, however, is cameos, and I'm not just talking about regulars, or people who would normally show their faces in a superhero/comic book based movie. The cameos here are so wild and wacky, in fact, that I've taken the liberty of categorizing them according to type. In order of appearance, they are:
1) The "We've Arrived" cameo: As before, Deadpool is joined by X-men Colossus (again played by Stefan Kapicic and terrible CGI) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and as before, Deadpool makes one of his patented 4th-wall breaking quips about how "the studio" can't even spare more X-Men. Behind him, however, quietly closing the door is no other than Hank McCoy, aka the Beast, played by Nicholas Hoult. Beside him are virtually the entire cast of the last X-Men movie, including James MacAvoy as Professor X, Tye Sheridan as Cyclops and Evan Peters as Quicksilver to name a few. This is their only appearance in the film, but it is a nice nod from Fox to acknowledge the simple mathematical fact that Deadpool is, hands-down, their most financially successful property, and by God they can certainly spare some X-men for him. They just won't, because Deadpool is an idiot.
2) The "HOLY COW, THAT WAS HIM?!?" cameo: When Josh Brolin's Cable teleports to the past from the future, he lands near two rednecks who are discussing, of all things, toilet paper. It's a moment that stands out for its bizarre but genuinely funny dialogue about which brand of toilet paper offers maximum comfort, and is cut short when Cable tranquilizes the two rednecks and steals their pickup truck. One of them, it turns out, the guy with a lot to say about quality toilet paper, was Matt Damon, under heavy make-up. The other one, with less dialogue was character actor Alan Tudyk. I watched the whole movie without knowing this and basically only found out when I Google-searched another cameo in this film. This may not have been one of the flashier cameos, but in retrospect it was, for me anyway, the funniest. So Matt Damon's got two Marvel movie cameos under his belt (having had a much more visible cameo in Thor: Ragnarok), albeit not from the same studio, and it'd be interesting to see if this becomes a semi-regular thing for him.
3) The "I Was Expecting to See More of This Guy" cameo: comedian/character actor Terry Crews is perhaps best known to audiences for lip-syncing to Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" in the Wayans Brothers' comedy film White Chicks. Personally my favorite Crews role is his little-seen turn as the wrestler-turned-president Camacho in Mike Judge's tragically prophetic Idiocracy. Either way, he featured heavily in the marketing materials and so I figured I'd be seeing quite a lot of him. As it turns out, the film's very best scene, when he and the other members of Deadpool's newly-assembled team X-Force parachute into heavy wind, turns out to be his last as nearly every member of the newly formed team dies horribly: the preposterous-looking Shatterstar is shredded by helicopter rotors, splattering green blood, with his only remains being his ridiculous braid, the acid-vomiting Zeitgeist is sucked into a wood cutter and pulped, and Crews' Bedlam smashes headlong into a bus. It was completely out of left field and an utter laugh riot, so even though Crews had no further participation in the film, his cameo was a damned good one, but it wasn't even the most striking one in that madcap sequence, which brings me to...
4) The "IS THAT WHO I THINK IT WAS?" cameo: when the members of X-Force who aren't named Deadpool or Domino meet their grisly demise, one member, the Vanisher, who up until this point has, well, basically vanished, lands on some electric wires and is predictably fried to death, at which point he is, for a split-second, revealed to be Brad Pitt. Now, when I saw this, at first I thought I was seeing a lookalike, like Karl Urban or something, but later the end credits revealed that it was, actually, Brad Pitt, and a quick Google search (which also turned up the aforementioned Damon cameo) confirmed it. It was quite a coup; Pitt may not be quite the A-lister he once was, but he's never appeared in a comic-book based movie before and considering that he was one of the actors approached for the role of Cable but had to turn it down, it was nice that Fox was able to at least get an entertaining cameo out of him.
5) The "Best Use of Recycled Footage" cameo: By now, I think Fox has all but given up on their X-Men timeline making any sense, so when Deadpool walks onto the climactic scene of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in which Hugh Jackman's Wolverine meets the 'Dead Pool' for the first time, and shoots the godawful version of himself in the head, there's no point in asking if it makes any sense. What matters is that it's hilarious, though it was a shame they couldn't have filmed any new footage with Hugh Jackman.
6) The "Erasing Bad Decisions" cameo: It's certainly a stretch to call an appearance by Ryan Reynolds in a movie starring (and written by) Ryan Reynolds a cameo, but really, when "Ryan Reynolds" eagerly sits down to read a little script called "Green Lantern" only to be shot through the head by none other than Deadpool, it's a truly epic moment, on par with Thor arriving in Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity War (Well, not really, but it was really funny).
Truth be told, Deadpool 2 may have waxed cliche on more than one occasion, but it really was a brilliant move to work all those cameos into the film; they gave it yet another bit of quirkiness that no other superhero/comic-book based movie can claim to have.
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