When the original Deadpool movie was released in 2016 it was made on a small budget (for a superhero movie) with a subversive main character who mercilessly mocked everything audiences love about superhero movies with a surprisingly filthy mouth.
It shouldn’t have worked but went on to be a mega success, earning almost $800 million on a $60 million budget.
After success like that, the sequel doesn’t have the benefit of coming out under the radar – this one is expected to repeat its lightning-in-a-bottle magic.
In guarantee repeated success, the team behind Deadpool 2 has chosen to simply make everything that worked about the first movie bigger and better. They’re not breaking the mold in any way.
That’s good news and bad news. The good news is, it still works – the fourth wall breaks (when a character speaks directly to the camera), the meta-jokes, the cartoonish violence and non-stop pop culture references deliver solid laughs.
The bad news is it’s starting to feel a little less special because we’ve seen it all before.
This time around, tragedy has struck Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) who finds himself despondent and moping around the X-Men house as an against-his-will trainee.
When he meets a young teenage mutant named Russell with fists of fire, his paternal instinct is activated and he spends the rest of the film trying to save him from himself and new bad guy Cable (Josh Brolin), who has come back from the future to take Russell out.
To protect his new buddy, Deadpool assembles a team of superhero rejects he calls X-Force. None of them have particularly great super powers (acid vomit, luck, vanishing) and one guy named Peter (Rob Delaney) simply answered the ad and wanted to be part of a team, but considering Deadpool is their leader it all seems about right.
Reynolds continues to give everything he’s got to his wisecracking, non-stop yammering, filth-spewing merc with the mouth.
Newcomer Zazie Beetz, playing the very lucky Domino, is a welcome addition to the cast and regulars Morena Baccarin (Vanessa), TJ Miller (Weasel) and Karan Soni (Dopinder) continue to deliver solid laughs. Josh Brolin, in his second superhero villain role of the month (he also plays Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War) channels a no nonsense, part Terminator, part Clint Eastwood vibe to make Cable a worthwhile addition.
Deadpool 2 is offensive, lewd, violent, funny as hell and not even remotely appropriate for children.