Movie Review: Deadpool 2 (2018)

In my movie reviews, I usually try to avoid any spoilers that are not in the trailer or the first half hour of the movie. However, I'm not going to hold back on mentioning the names of the characters who appear in the film. I won't mention the actor cameos. You can watch the trailer at the end of this post.

Deadpool 2 is directed by David Leitch and stars Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, and Jack Kesy.

Deadpool 2 has much of the same self-referential humor that made the first one such a hit. It constantly reminds you that you are watching a superhero movie. Yes, you're an adult watching a movie based on comic books initially created for children. And it's awesome.

The references abound. Green Lantern, Avengers, Batman, Cher and John Wick get mentioned. Most importantly, we see that Deadpool has apparently also seen Logan and cherishes a spoiler heavy figurine depicting the end of that movie. Wolverine is not only a rival within the X-Men movie storylines, but Deadpool also sees him as a rival at the box office. How meta.

If this was just a movie full of pop culture references I don't think I would have enjoyed it all that much. In fact it started to get tiring for me by the end of the first act. But I was a comic book collector in my young teens. I wasn't into most of the Avengers comic so I'm not really a fan of a lot of the MCU movies. But I loved the X-Men. I grabbed anything to do with mutants. The Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, Classic X-Men (reprints of old Uncanny X-Men), X-Factor, Excalibur, New Mutants, Fallen Angels (one of my favorite limited series) and of course X-Force.

In this film Deadpool reluctantly becomes an X-Men trainee. Attempting to contain Russell "Firefist" Collins, a mutant at a religious anti-mutant "orphanage" for mutants, he see the child is abused and kills one of the workers. Deadpool and Russell are both equipped with power-dampening collars (a story device I despise) and sent to a prison for mutants. Cable arrives from the future on a mission to kill one of the imprisoned mutants. Deadpool escapes and forms the first movie version of X-Force. They team up to stop Cable.

I was an early reader of X-Force and kind of drifted away from comics in my late teens. I remember Cable, so having him in the movie was exciting. But I'll be honest that I barely remember Deadpool, and even then only as a villain. But I'm not a stickler for accuracy in adaptation. I'll take an X-Force led by Deadpool. Domino gets plenty of screen time. I would have liked to see more of Shatterstar. I am almost embarrassed that I didn't realize that Russell "Firefist" Collins was a younger international take on Rusty Collins, whose first appearance was in X-Factor #1, the very first X-Men related comic I ever bought, new and off the shelf at the drugstore.

These are all characters from the Rob Liefield era. My recollection is that his characters were more about personality and background than superpowers. What exactly is Cable's superpower? Even as a reader of those comics I have no recollection. He just looked cool. You can look it up but it seems not to matter too much. In the comic books he is from the future, the grown-up son of Scott "Cyclops" Summers and, well I'm even confused by the wikipedia page on Madelyne Pryor, a clone of Jean "Marvel Girl/Phoenix" Grey. I just hope the MCU and X-Men films don't go down the convoluted path previously tread by the many writers of 20th Century comic books.

The hard part can always be realizing that I am trying to parse this movie with my recollection of storylines written for a previous generation, in another century. So much has happened since I abandoned comics that I'm surprised to even see that the teenage mutant saved by X-Factor in 1986 has somehow made it to the big screen.

If you like the self-referential humor of the original, you should like this, but it goes more into action and X-comic storylines by the second half. If you are looking forward to X-Force and New Mutants movies, you should love this. While I'm partly hopeful and excited at the prospect of the mutants appearing in the MCU, I am just as exuberant about seeing the mutants in a separate universe. I mean, I like these movies much better anyway. I give it a B+, only because I expect the sequels and tie-ins to be even better.

This trailer is the property of 20th Century Fox

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