By Kyle Barr
Deadpool, the fourth wall-breaking ninja of the first 2016 film, was everywhere before “Deadpool 2” arrived in theaters. Seriously, everywhere. He was on billboards with his name spelled with a skull and poo emoji. He was in paintings spoofing the Sistine Chapel. His masked face was even put on the slipcovers of DVDs in Walmarts. So instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger looking gruff on the cover of “Predator” you had Deadpool staring out with a bland expression and holding a water gun.
It was almost too much. It was as if the 20th Century Fox sequel had to convince you even before you stepped in the theater that this movie was going to be zany, off the wall action and satire.
Well it is, at least for the most part. Really, the film is at its best when it’s playing with common superhero comic and film tropes. It’s at its worst when it’s not.
“Deadpool 2” starts out with our main character, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) laying on a bed of gasoline cans and lighting a match. The explosion causes his body parts to fly every which way. How is this possible?
Deadpool cannot die. If he has his limbs removed, they will simply grow back. If he is shot, his wounds will instantly heal. This is bad for Wade Wilson, the man behind Deadpool’s mask, as a terrible tragedy early on makes Deadpool want to quit living. X-Men member Colossus (voiced by Stefan Kapicic) tries to make him turn his life around and become a member of the vigilante mutant group, but murderous mutant from the future Cable (Josh Brolin) comes back in time to assassinate a young mutant named Russell (Julian Dennison). Deadpool, who decides to protect him, finds he can’t die just yet.
All the actors do a fine job in this film. Reynolds as Deadpool gives as much an enthusiastic performance as one could ask from a man who made the first film as a passion project. Another standout is Domino, played by Zazie Beetz, as she is just simply a fun character to be around. Her mutant power is Luck, and it was amusing to watch the film’s writers come up with ways her power works. Beetz’ sarcastic and self-confident style does such a good job playing off Deadpool’s antics.
The film takes a little too long to pick up speed. The beginning act drags, even among the epic, R-rated fight scenes that include our main hero jumping headfirst into bullets and armed men like a kid jumping into a swimming pool on the first day of summer.
But the joyride comes to a screeching halt as soon as we get to the romantic side of the story. Deadpool and his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) had what was an honestly sweet relationship in the first movie, but that mostly came down to how the two characters played off each other’s sense of sardonic and often violent humor. However, in this movie, none of that comes through. At certain points, in dreamlike sequences, Deadpool has conversations with his girlfriend who tells him his heart “isn’t in the right place,” a line that seems to come straight out of a soap opera’s playbook. I kept expecting the joke to continue where Deadpool reaches inside his chest to move his heart back into place, but that never happened.
It’s bad likely because some of the gags in this film are just so good. Most of the best, hardest hitting gags come in the middle of the film. There’s nothing worse than ruining or explaining a joke. Suffice it to say when Deadpool tries to start his own team by the derivative name X-Force, it leads to perhaps the best sequence in the entire film that pokes the hardest at well-worn superhero clichés.
The movie is easily at its best when it relies on this biting satire of the superhero genre. The jokes are so good that they make you want for more. It gets worse when it cannot deliver. There are some great jokes made at the expense of Cable, who is really the stereotype of every jacked-up gritty vigilante hero we’ve had since the ’90s, but in the end those jokes don’t lead anywhere. The best satire often wants to come to a conclusion about whatever its ribbing, but this film lands somewhere in between and can’t seem to break away from the genre convention.
Worse, it can’t do the romance, and hopefully when they do the inevitable sequel and go for even bigger, they leave all that at home.
Rated R for violence and profanity, “Deadpool 2” is now playing in local theaters.
