Fish and Cherries Productions

Summary: The Merc With The Mouth is back! That’s right, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) dons his red costume to terrorize the underworld as Deadpool. After a crime boss kills his paramour Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), Deadpool becomes destitute and in an effort to find purpose, joins the X-Men. But a mission gone wrong lands him and a young mutant named Russell (Julian Dennison) in prison, only for a time-traveler named Cable (Josh Brolin) to break in and try to kill Russell before he becomes something terrible. Deadpool and Cable clash, one thing leads to another, and the fight for Russell turns into a crass, irreverent, action-packed rollercoaster that only Deadpool could provide.

Review: Deadpool 2 didn’t quite have me in the beginning, despite my laughs. It felt like it was trying too hard to top the previous movie with more swearing, over-the-top violence, and crudeness, not to mention some melodrama that didn’t seem to fit. However, once Deadpool met Cable, the laughs came hard and never stopped as it devolved into the insanity that I loved so much. From that moment on, I was having a blast.

Much of the humor does come from the outlandishness of the situations are as well as pure irreverence as the movie gives the middle finger to both polite society and fan expectations. There was a lot of pre-release build-up about the introduction of X-Force and the payoff is one of the biggest trolls I’ve seen from cinema in a while. There’s other insanely amusing stuff like a collection of post-credits scenes that put the MCU to shame. The saying goes “go big or go home” and Deadpool 2 went big.

This movie also has a steady stream of emotional moments too, like Deadpool and Russell’s interactions or a lot of Cable’s on-screen presence. This is where the film’s weaknesses rear their heads — not because a Deadpool movie shouldn’t be emotional, but because it starts bumping up against cliches that this franchise is above. Thankfully, these misses are far outnumbered by the hits and I found myself feeling for Wade in a real way, even if I prefer him at his wackiest.

Plenty of old faces come back too — Weasel (T.J. Miller), his landlady Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), and Dopinder the cab driver (Karan Soni) come back for more tomfoolery as do Colossus (Stefan Kapi?i?) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) (the latter along with her girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) are tragically underused). So it’s familiar in some places, but different in others, and all in all a great superhero flick. It’s also one you should definitely leave the kids behind for, unless they’re okay with swearing, bloodiness, and sophomoric humor. But hey, that’s…

DeadpoooOOOOOOoooool! Yeah!

Oh. Great. You’re back.

Hey, Colin Eldred-Ronin. See yOU’re still doing one of previ-review-write-up… thing…

Are you drunk?

YOU’RE drunk.

Oh god, I can smell your breath from here!

YeeeeEEEEAAAH, knocked Infinity War off its throne at the box office. Ceeeeelebraaaaation~… get a real job… I love you… ooof.

Aaaaaand he just passed out on my floor.

Blegh…

…and he threw up on my shoes. Great. Just great.

Fun Tidbit #1: One of the new heroes that sticks around is Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose superpower is essentially good luck. Wade goes on a bit of a rant about how little sense that makes and that whoever invented that was “probably someone who can’t even draw feet.” This is a reference to Domino’s (as well as Cable and Deadpool’s) creator Rob Liefeld, a man infamous for — among many things — his inability to draw feet very well.

Fun Tidbit #2: In an anti-mutant orphanage, there’s a room that’s peppered with anti-mutant propaganda. Among these is a piece referring to M-Day, a comic event where the Scarlet Witch (who is Magneto’s daughter, despite garbage retcons that were forced on the comics by the then feud between Marvel Studios and Fox) depowered all but 200 of the Earth’s mutant population which eventually led to the Avengers vs. X-Men event. Given that the recent acquisition of Fox puts the X-Men under the same studio as the rest of the Marvel characters, this might be more prophetic than originally intended…