“Deadpool 2” Sucks, Psych!

Image of Deadpool Promotional Poster showing Deadpool and Cable imitating Michelangelo's "The Creation of David"
Deadpool 2 Promotion Poster courtesy 20th Century Fox

“Deadpool 2,” directed by David Leitch, isn’t just a superhero movie. Sure, the plot is ripe with all of the cliché superhero storylines and gimmicks: good versus evil, great power and responsibility, a few moral lessons, and a ton of CGI battles. As it purposely pokes fun at these staples of the genre, “Deadpool 2” is a comedy. The best comedy of the year, so far.

The movie finds Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) traveling around the world and shooting bad guys in the face and every other body part. When DP is done slicing through baddies without impunity, he returns home to the love of his life, Vanessa. When Deadpool allows a criminal to slip away, they come back and gun his fiancée down.

After the death of his fiancée, the opening credits flashed on screen: “Produced by Did You Really Just Kill Her?” and “Presented by What The Fuck?” and “Written by The Real Villains of the Movie.” Each film credit had me full on snort-laughing.

Deadpool vows to never kill again, psych! He disembarks on a rampage that resembles a bloody ballet that kills every bad guy involved in Vanessa’s death. Deadpool, blaming himself, blows himself to pieces in an explosion of cocaine and kerosene. This inevitably results in DP temporarily joining the X-men as a trainee, trainee-jersey and all.

While dispatched on his first team mission with Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), our anti-hero meets the angry teenage mutant Russell, also known as Firefist. Russell is in a rage, shooting jetstreams outside of the orphanage in which he lives. After Deadpool successfully deescalates the situation, he learns that Russell is being abused by the staff and in classic Deadpool fashion he shoots one of the pervy guards in the forehead.

While wearing power dampening collars, Deadpool and Russell are both imprisoned. In comes Cable (Josh Brolin), who is hellbent on killing Russell for crimes he committed in the future. The child Russell evades death and Deadpool escapes prison after having his collar, legs, back, neck, and skull busted. Realizing that Cable is too big of a mark for him alone, Deadpool puts out an ad for mercenaries. With his confidant Weasel (T.J. Miller), he forms a team that he eventually names X-Force. Deadpool is joined by Domino (Zazie Beetz), Bedlam (Terry Crews), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgard), Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Vanisher (played by a surprise cameo that will blow your mind), and Peter (Rob Delaney), whose superpower is so deadly and magnificent that I couldn’t begin to describe it.

During a dazzling and breathtaking rescue attempt, we get a showcase of Domino’s mutant power, which she says is “really good luck.” Domino glides through the chaotic scene of a spastic high-speed chase, filled with explosions, gunfire and gratuitous violence, with the calm demeanor of a person with nothing to lose, because she can’t lose.

Zazie Beetz told Entertainment Tonight that she liked that Domino’s creator never assigned her a race and the character used many international names as her aliases.

“She’s not really a sidekick, she’s a mercenary, she does her job and moves out. I really liked that about her,” Beetz said.

After the botched rescue attempt, Russell (Julian Dennison) teams up with the Juggernaut, voiced by Ryan Reynolds, and begins his personal mission of revenge on the orphanage that abused him.

Julian Dennison is a 15-year old actor from New Zealand that had his breakout role in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” which was a critical success at the Sundance Film Festival. At Sundance, he met with 20th Century Fox about “Deadpool 2” but had never seen the first Deadpool film.

Dennison told Tom Philip of GQ, “At the Fox meeting, they said, ‘Oh yeah, let’s talk about Deadpool 2.' I hadn’t seen the first one yet, because it’s rated R in New Zealand and my mum was like, ‘Yeah, it’s Deadpool, mate, you’re not watching it anytime soon.' I only saw it a few weeks ago.”

Though the young actor has found some success while oozing the confidence and exuberance of a much more seasoned actor, Dennison still happily remains innocently naive like any other teen his age, both on the set and off. Telling GQ:

“Tell you what, I wish I had a swear jar on set. I would be a rich man right now. But yeah, if I wasn’t comfortable with saying something, David and the writers and Ryan, they were really accommodating. There’s a lot of colorful language in the movie, and the first time I watched it was with just me and my mum and my pop. I would look over to her every time I would swear in the film and be like, ‘This is awkward,’ because I’m sitting right next to her. But she loved the film.’”

When the movie is all said and done, you are rewarded with the only decent post-credit scene that Marvel has had since the first Deadpool. I found myself returning to the theater twice more to absorb all of the jokes and each time I was rewarded with a boisterous chuckle at a previously missed prank, pun, or wisecrack. The important thing to remember is that Deadpool does not try to be anything other than what it is, a comic book movie with the main character being nothing more than, as Cable so eloquently put it, “a clown dressed up as a sex toy.”