Review: Deadpool 2

I’m gonna give it to you straight, I thought the first Deadpool was simply OK.

Sure, it wasn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt it dragged too much during the second act, the flashback nature of the main plotline was paper thin at best and the characters were extremely one-note and one dimensional, save for Deadpool himself of course.

I wasn’t expecting too much from the sequel, perhaps a simply decent but not stand-out film, but nothing all-out amazing. So you can imagine my shock when Deadpool 2 not only equalled the original film, it managed to exceed it in every possible way.

This time around, Deadpool 2 actually has a fairly decent plot. Rather than being a superhero (antihero?) origin story, it’s a time travel tale about Cable, a mutant from the future, coming back in time to try and kill the kid who killed his wife and child in the future and also destroyed the entire world. Thus, Deadpool 2 attempts to answer the “If you could kill baby Hitler, would you kill baby Hitler?” moral conundrum, albeit in a tongue firmly placed in cheek manner.

It’s definitely an interesting question for a film about a sweary man in red spandex to attempt to answer.

The cast is pretty good this time around too, a lot better than the limited cast (and indeed, budget) the first film had to play with. Ryan Reynolds is as funny and on-point as ever here as Deadpool, which makes you wonder why the hell they chose to sow his mouth shut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. 

Josh Brolin is also great as Cable and gives a weirdly nuanced performance for a movie such as this.  For me though, the real stand-out performance is Zazie Beetz as Domino. Never in my lifetime did I expect to see Domino on the big screen (let alone done justice) but Deadpool 2 manages to do it effortlessly.

The only issues I have with the cast is the annoying child actor, Julian Dennison, who plays Firefist and how unnecessary T.J Miller’s character, Weasel, was in the film.

Julian Dennison is simply not a great actor at this early stage in his career, and I doubt throwing him into a big budget superhero blockbuster is going to help that fact. As for Weasel, he barely does anything in the film and I feel that if you’re going to cast an actor as funny as T.J Miller, you should use him for more than a simple tertiary character.

The humour in the film is far superior to the original. For starters, it doesn’t really on “OMG Fourth Wall Breaks” as much as the original film did, instead preferring to use character humour more often. Sure, it still uses fourth wall breaks, and when it does it uses it extremely effectively, but it doesn’t rely on that wholesale. The action is simply more of the same kind of action that the original film had, which makes sense seeing as the original film’s best point was the action.

Deadpool 2 is a fun addition to the Foxverse X-Men, and probably one of the best X-Men films overall. It’s funny, chaotic (in a good way) and just generally a good time.