Thursday, July 18, 2024

My Review of Deadpool 2 (2018)

 


Written by Reese Rhett And Paul Wernick And Ryan Reynolds 
Directed by David Leitch

Cable: "I use a device to slide through time. The longer I travel, the harder it is to control. I got two charges: one to get me here, one to get me home."
Deadpool: "Well... that's just lazy writing."

Hot off the success of the first movie, Ryan Reynolds was definitely eager to prove that he wasn't a flash in the pan with the superhero lark. Would this movie prove him, right? Yeah, it did. 

Of course, it's a movie that also decided to do one of the most loathed comic book tropes as well. Yup, poor Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) got fridged. Actually she got shot and killed early into the movie and her death put Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) into something of a funk.

Trying to get him out the funk was Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) along with Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Briana Hildebrand) and the latter's girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna). They thought involving him in a mission to contain teenage mutant Firefist (Julian Dennison) would be a good idea. Instead it went awry and both Deadpool and Firefist ended up in prison. 

It was in prison that Deadpool and Firefist could've bonded but between time travelling killer Cable (Josh Brolin) trying to murder Firefist and Deadpool being a dick to the struggling teenager, the kid ended up being a bigger threat than Wade expected. So !uch of a threat that a team needed to be assembled.

The team in question comprised of characters like Domino (Zazie Beetz), Bedlam (Terry Crews), Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Vanisher (Brad Pitt), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgard) and Peter Wisdom (Rob Delaney). They made up a variation of X Force but they're mostly there to be killed off. Except for Doino, who really did have luck on her side and was essentially the female lead of the group. 

Of course the movie also had Deadpool and Cable eventually working together with Domino, Colossus, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Yukio and Dopinder (Karan Soni) to try and prevent Firefist from getting revenge on his evil Headmaster (Eddie Marsan), along with Juggernaut (Reynolds). It's another bloody battle but one with a positive outcome in regards to the overall outcome with Firefist. Two movies in and maybe, Wade Wilson has it in him to be a superhero after all.

- Thanks to time travel, Vanessa's death was ultimately reversed with other characters like Shatterstar and Peter being spared too.
- The credit sequences had Deadpool killing off his previous movie incarnation to a bemused Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), preventing Ryan Reynolds from doing Green Lantern and visiting baby Hitler.
- Dopinder's developed quite a bloodlust between movies. He even got an impressive kill towards the end of this one. It was nice to see Weasel (T.J. Miller) and Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) again. 
- Yup, there was some brief cameos from Professor X (James McAvoy), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Quicksilver (Evan Peters) and Nightcrawler (Kofi Smit-McPhee) in this movie.
- Standout music Celine Dion's Ashes, Pat Benatar's We Belong and AC/DC's Thunderstruck.
- Chronology: It's been two years since the events of the first movie.

Deadpool 2 does feel like Reynolds took everything people loved about the first movie, upped the ante a tad and made sure not to change too much as a sequel. It's as good as the first movie with a great slew of new characters to play around with. It also moved things along a little on the LGBT front with some allusion to Deadpool's pansexuality along with the Negasonic/Yukio romance.

Rating: 8 out of 10 

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