Review of Deadpool 2 (2018) by Thequietgamer — 18 Sep 2018

Ryan Reynolds has made a career for himself by playing Ryan Reynolds in literally every movie he's ever been in. And by being handsome. Mostly the handsome thing. It never won him much critical praise though until he started playing the character of Deadpool. Who, as the comics will tell you, is actually just Ryan Reynolds. So kudos to him for finally finding a way to make that work and getting that superhero franchise he's tried umpteen times for.

Deadpool 2 is more of the same with tons of callbacks to the previous film. I kind of wish they would ditch the sentimentality and just go full on superhero farce already. The cliché emotional stuff with Morena Baccarin is easily the least interesting part of the whole thing. The movie is at it's best when it's delivering more of the crude, irreverent humor and gleefully gratuitous violence of it's predecessor. Luckily, that's what it spends most of it's time doing.

Nearly every bit of pop culture you could think of gets skewered here. Especially other superhero movies. Deadpool once again did a way better job of having the characters operate like the do in the comics than any of the main X-Men films ever have. Even to the point of fixing another tragically mishandled fan-favorite villain. It's also still very refreshing to experience a superhero film make such liberal use of gore, heavy profanity, and killing. Let's hope Disney and Marvel take some notes from what Fox was able to achieve by making R-rated cape and costume flicks now that they've recovered their long absent mutants. Oh, and that they keep Reynolds around.

Deadpool 2 doesn't really take it's title character in any new directions or branch out from what the previous film did much at all. And it didn't really need to. The first Deadpool was such a breath of fresh air (even in spite of sticking close to origin story conventions) that a second helping feels like exactly what we needed. Especially since round two might actually be a bit funnier. Let's also not forget how it's one of the best Fox movies at doing the comics justice. Even the X-Men films I've really liked have managed to butcher a character in one way or another. Deadpool 2 gets them all right and limits it's use of the overexposed Wolverine to a few well-placed jokes.

8.