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theinquisitivej · 6 years

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‘Deadpool 2’ – A Movie Review

I’ve felt conflicted about this movie for a while now.

Even before seeing this sequel to a crass yet thoughtfully put together send-up to superhero movies which ended up being one of the most pleasant surprises of 2016, my excitement and positivity for Deadpool 2 waned with the tragic news of the death of stuntwoman S.J. Harris during filming. No movie will ever be worth a human life. I won’t say I didn’t laugh and enjoy the film, because I did. I laughed loudly, and I laughed often. But my sense of unease was still there just below the surface throughout the runtime, never quite leaving me. Whether it’s callous to watch the fun superhero movie and forget the real cost that went into making it, or if S.J. Harris was the kind of person who would have wanted people to keep working and finish the project she worked on is a question I don’t know the answer to. Any discomfort I felt during the film was especially prominent whenever T.J. Miller was on screen, as the discovery that he choked and raped a woman in college and his intentional false report of a bomb threat on a train more recently has somewhat soured my opinion of the man. On paper, a lot of what he does in this movie is his usual brand of humour which has really worked for me in the past. But any time I see him or hear that voice of his which once made me smile and laugh, I just feel sick in my throat. All this context results in a movie I had complicated feelings about before I even sat down to watch it.

But wouldn’t you know it, Deadpool 2 is a pretty decent film with some strong emotional moments and ideas that have caused me to reflect on it in a satisfying way, but at the same time, it goes in a direction I really hoped it wouldn’t and makes some decisions which have left me feeling uncertain. So, I guess I would’ve been conflicted about this movie no matter what happened.

One concern that many people had is fortunately not a problem, and that’s whether Deadpool 2 could still make the character and his humour work a second time around. Wade ‘Deadpool’ Wilson is a character with flexible ethics who gets wrapped up in superhero antics and has a sense of humour that relies on undermining or subverting the familiar tropes of dramatic stories from the genre which take themselves too seriously. He does this either by showing an awareness of the story he’s in and the medium being used to tell it, making direct remarks to other real-world movie properties he should really have no knowledge of, or going in a wildly different direction to what’s typically expected of superheroes. It’s remarkable, then, that in the two years since the previous film, the superhero movie industry has progressed so much that he has tons of new material to work with in this film.

Whether this kind of referential humour will hit as hard in years to come remains to be seen, but it’s written in a way that makes it work with each situation Wade finds himself in. The references don’t come out of nowhere, but they still take you back enough to make you laugh. It also helps any future audiences to situate when this film released, and what kind of environment it was in when it decided to offer its humorous take on superhero movies as they stood in 2018. This approach directly tells the audience “we’re taking a look at where things are right now, and we’re going to have a bit of fun with it”, which is hard to argue with and lets viewers know where they stand, no matter when they watch it.

Even if that conceit isn’t enough to get you on board and the referential humour is a problem for you, Ryan Reynolds is exceptionally talented at delivering every line in a way that somehow manages to come across as both unbearably sassy and disarmingly sincere, perpetually making Deadpool a fun character to be around, even when he’s going through some hard times in this film. Between that and the hilarious new places they go with Deadpool’s powers of recovery as he is bent, impaled, and bisected throughout the film which results in some terrifically cartoonish scenarios, Deadpool 2 still understands the humour of its protagonist and how to make it work.

But as the opening and closing narration makes clear, this film is not just about Deadpool, but the ensemble of characters who join him. Many of the old characters like Dopinder, Colossus, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead return. While the film could have benefitted from more time being spent on the newer characters, the familiar faces continue to be fun, especially this depiction of Colossus, who is steadily growing into one of the best straight-man foils Deadpool has ever had. Yukio is introduced as Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s girlfriend, and while she doesn’t get any development, Shioli Kutsana’s friendly peppiness plays amusingly against Yukio’s dour girlfriend, and Yukio and Deadpool’s positive friendship throughout the movie is delightful. Julian Dennison plays a kid named Russell who is overly aggressive for much of his time on screen, but the young actor has some incredible talents and puts them to good use by making Russell surprisingly sympathetic. Zazie Beetz plays Domino, a character with the superpower of being incredibly lucky who swings in about halfway through the film and makes you wish she had come in even sooner. Her confidence, chemistry with Deadpool as none of his jabs even phase her, and her generally relaxed attitude as she goes through the movie knowing for a fact that everything will go exactly right for her is hugely enjoyable to watch. Josh Brolin is an inspired pick for Cable; I only wished that him and Deadpool shared more time together on screen, as the combination of his cliché hardman storyline with a tragic past and Deadpool’s irreverent attitude towards undermining anyone who takes themselves too seriously is a perfect match. While Deadpool takes the lion’s share of the film’s focus, the rest of the cast and the characters contribute a great deal to Deadpool 2.

But there is one character who gets the short straw, and this is where I start to feel conflicted on this film. Fair warning, there’s going to be full spoilers from now on until the last few parts of this review. Just look for the SPOILER SECTION ENDS HERE line.

What makes the first Deadpool work as well as it does is that it has a keen emotional heart to it which makes you care about Wade Wilson as a character. He’s fleshed out enough and played with such genuine warmth by Reynolds that you become deeply invested in his story, making him much more than just a vehicle for the film’s comedy. A key component to the first film’s heart is the relationship between Wade and Vanessa. The connection between these two immensely likeable characters is genuinely sweet and uplifting to watch, going beyond their infectious sense of humour and being most intensely felt when we see their moving dedication to one another when Wade is diagnosed with cancer. Wade’s motivation in the first movie is almost entirely fuelled by his love for Vanessa, and because of the strength of Marena Baccarin’s performance as this funny, charming woman with a fierce will, you completely empathise with him. Vanessa is her own character in the first Deadpool, and one of the biggest successes of that film.

And then Deadpool 2 starts with Vanessa being killed off to provide Wade with his motivation for the rest of the film. As the opening credits played, I was seething at how the film had went and gone exactly what I had hoped they wouldn’t do, throwing away not only one of the most mature, well-handled relationships I have ever seen in a superhero film, but also a terrific character who brought so much to the table. It felt like a misguided waste of storytelling potential, and the gag of the opening credits themselves being just as upset about this as I was didn’t help matters. Yes, it’s a fun joke that fits the tone and comedic style of these films, but it also felt a little galling, as if the film itself was saying “don’t you hate it when films kill off characters you like unnecessarily?”, as if it’s not doing exactly that and expecting you to be on board with it. Just because you’re pointing out the trope doesn’t mean that you’re not doing that exact trope.

And yet strangely, while the narrative of Deadpool 2 hinges on this initial decision which I still feel upset about, the emotional journey it takes is actually a very considerate and effective story about processing grief and finding something meaningful to do with yourself to make up for the immense hole that losing someone close to you can leave behind. That’s a remarkably nuanced journey for a character to go on, perhaps even more so than the revenge quest Deadpool was set on in the first movie. Reynolds nails the vulnerabilities of the character, conveying the bitter sadness that Wade is feeling and has no idea how to resolve whenever the mask is off and the pain on his face is there for all the world to see. When the mask is on and Wade is fully immersing himself in the persona of Deadpool, there are multiple occasions where Reynolds makes the character’s humour feel bittersweet, as if constantly acknowledging that this is all just a movie and making irreverent jokes is a coping mechanism to make the reality of the situation he’s in sting a little less. I’m unhappy with the decision to kill off Vanessa, but I do appreciate how they handle the effect this has on Wade’s character.

Then, at the very end of the movie after Wade completes his emotional journey, we see Deadpool use Cable’s repaired time-travel device in a mid-credits scene to go back in time and save Vanessa, undoing her death. So, we have a character death I wasn’t happy about but accepted once the rest of the film showed that it had some ideas of where to take this story, and then in the film’s very last moments, we’re told that the inciting tragedy has now never happened. Of course, there’s arguments for why this shouldn’t be an issue; we see Deadpool go on to break the internal logic of the film by killing the embarrassing interpretation of his character from the mess that was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, as well as the real-life actor Ryan Reynolds before he took on the role of Green Lantern, so we have to presume at least some of these time-travel mid-credits scenes are fun ideas that we shouldn’t think too hard about in the context of the film’s story. Also, if there was any character who would break his own story in order to get the ending he wanted, it would be Deadpool.

But despite these two reasonable points, this ending still bothers me. Both the director David Leitch and Reynolds (who is credited as a co-writer on the film) have said they believe that Vanessa is alive and well by the end of Deadpool 2. If that is the case, then does the quick, undiscussed and not-at-all unpacked resurrection of Vanessa undo a lot of the hard-hitting pathos of this narrative? What does this film about Wade struggling with who he is, what he should do, and whether he should carry on without Vanessa become when we know that Vanessa is alive by the end of the movie? Is it a case of Deadpool getting to live in a world where he hasn’t lost the person he cares about, but he still remembers losing her so all the emotions he felt and the lessons he learned are still there? Should I not think about it too much because it’s Deadpool, and he’s always walked the line between dramatic stories and self-aware comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously? Maybe, but the first film managed a balance between the two in a way where I laughed at the comedy and took the drama completely seriously. This time, I’m not entirely sure that the comedy and drama fits together as well as it did the first time around. It goes for a decent joke at the last minute, but this comes at the expense of complicating the legitimately powerful story it just spent 2 hours putting together. My emotional response to Deadpool 2 feels completely confused and tangled up, and I’m not sure how to unpick it.

SPOILER SECTION ENDS HERE

Much like Deadpool himself, I’m feeling torn in two different directions with this movie. Deadpool 2 tries to have it both ways at times, going for introspective, dramatic storytelling that has consequences and leaves you feeling emotional and contemplative, but also feels indebted to the meta-humour which, this time around, goes in a direction that undercuts some of the dramatic impact this film could have had. Even now, I don’t know what to think about this movie. It tells a story that gets to me and makes me feel honestly quite soulful and reflective, and it does so with a cast of great characters played by (mostly) charismatic actors who consistently make me laugh. But the occasional bum note joke, lack of the same tight focus the first film had, and, most importantly for me, the questionable storytelling decisions taken at the start and end of the film result in a sequel that leaves me feeling more uncertain than it does delighted.

6/10.

A film that honestly fascinates me in how uncertain it leaves me feeling. This is a decent sequel to Deadpool; it occasionally stumbles, but it doesn’t disappoint.

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