Like most of us, I have been waiting eagerly for over two years to see Deadpool 2. I was so excited about this premiere, that I donned my Deadpool shirt, jacket, necklace, and socks and drove to a theatre located an hour and a half away from my house, because it was the only one around showing the Deadpool double feature (at a mighty $28 price tag, I might add). No part of me had even considered that this movie would be short of amazing. Boy, was I wrong!
I loved Deadpool more than any other movie of the 2010s. Partly because of the humour and original take on superheroes (a genre that I keep up with religiously), partly because it came to me at a time when I was dealing with the cancer diagnosis of a close family member and the fact that Wade got his powers because of a sort of cancer treatment was pretty awesome, but mainly because of the smart writing. The latter sure went down the tubes in this instalment.
Let’s start with that beginning. Vanessa gets shot and killed. It seems that ever since Batman V Superman, these new superhero movies all feel the need to kill off our main characters…but we’ll get to that later.
Deadpool tries to unsuccessfully kill himself multiple times, and each time he is ‘close’ he gets to see Vanessa in this dreamlike afterlife for a brief moment…see, something I liked about Deadpool was that is was at least sort of ‘believable’ in a comic book sort of way. But these afterlife sequences struck me not as emotional, but just plain dumb. They did not fit into a movie like this. This is not What Dreams May Come. It’s a humorous superhero movie.
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Then, in a bizarre turn of events, Wade is taken to jail with a mutant fourteen-year-old. To begin with, why would a fourteen-year-old be sent to an adult prison? You’d think that since it’s a mutant prison, the kids and adults would be kept separate. In addition, it was obvious that the child was being abused. Why was Deadpool the only one to notice and sympathies with him?
Anyway, while they’re incarcerated, they’re required to wear collars that disable their superhuman abilities. Just to refresh your memory, Wade’s superpower is that his body has the ability to heal itself whenever necessary. So, how is it that as soon as the collar is put on him, the cancer returns? Given that his body’s healing abilities would be reversed if he were to sustain a wound after receiving them, wouldn’t all of the injuries he’s suffered since then be enough to kill him? If this is the case, why did the cancer return so quickly and with such vigor? It’d be gone if it were eradicated. It would never return, let alone with such force.
To be honest, the whole jail scene drags on for an inordinate amount of time. By the way, why do all of the recent superhero films feature scenes set in prison now? The Avengers: Infinity War, Guardians of the Galaxy: Civil War, and now Suicide Squad…enough already!
Also, the number of laughs was significantly lower than in the original. In fact, it’s unusual to hear someone laugh in this room. And four out of five times, the joke is cheesy and derivative. That is to say, the original provided so much fresh material that any jokes included here are essentially rehashed or targeted at a 14-year-old boy audience.
To be honest, this is where the film failed to engage me. I came to terms with the fact that my fondness for the first Deadpool movie was unwarranted. This is a wonderful treat. And Deadpool 2 wouldn’t be the same as the first one, both would be different movies.
While the comedy increased in volume as the film progressed, the majority of the best jokes had already been revealed in the trailer. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t seem to find any redeeming qualities in anyone. There were far too many plot holes for me to keep track of, and Cable was a dud.
You can skip to the end if you don’t want to read the rest of it. Seeing as Cable can only travel back in time once to save his family and once to get back to them, Deadpool makes a joke about lazy writing about it. At the very least, he acknowledges the sloppiness of the writing.
And once again, after a bizarre series of events, Deadpool is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to save the life of that fourteen-year-old mutant (who has an Australian accent that no one even mentions by the way). He accomplishes this by donning a prison-issued collar that renders mutants powerless and being shot.
But oh, wait, remember how Cable can go back in time? He does that and saves Deadpool. Now, if he really wanted to save Deadpool, why wouldn’t he have just removed the collar as Deadpool was dying so that Deadpool could heal himself? The collars were removable. It had previously been removed from the scene, as had we! Then he could have redirected his time travel to a more useful destination.
But never mind all that, because as soon as the credits start to roll, we see Entaxonic Teenage Warhead and her GF repairing Cable’s time travel thingy, and guess what? They save Vanessa. Moreover, this enables Wade Wilson to save one of the recruits he recruited for his team, which is absurd because, given his ability, why wouldn’t he prevent his team from jumping from the helicopter in the first place, ensuring no one was killed? This scene essentially proves that the plot and events of the film were all for naught. Adding time travel to a movie like this makes a lot of the plot illogical.
There were numerous other problems, but addressing them all would require a short book.
You could say I’m heartbroken. When it came to comic books, Deadpool was the anti-establishment hero. When it came to film and comics, his work stood out. He had it all: sass, humor, risk-taking, and intelligence. Though there’s a part of me that wants to get rid of all my Deadpool memorabilia in the wake of the film’s poor reviews, I refuse to let that ruin my affection for the first film. There is always the brilliant original to fall back on.
