'Deadpool 2' Is The Very Violent & Bloody Slapstick Sequel You Were Hoping For

deadpool 2

It’s hard to begrudge a film from employing familiar tropes when it’s mocking them as it goes. This is the essential loophole that superhero films have —in effort to combat comic-book-movie fatigue— been employing more and more often. None moreso than Deadpool, the little-movie-that-could that succeeded, upon its 2016 release, by playing caped-crusaderdom as R-rated comedy.

And Deadpool 2, the obligatory sequel, employs oh-so-many familiar tropes: the opening act killing of a loved-one (who falls to the ground in slow motion, then after they’ve died it’s raining); a this-time-it’s-personal vengeance mission; a child taken under the wing as way of humanising ultraviolent anti-hero (Save the Cat!, etc); getting-the-gang-together; a CGI fight between two Hulk-esque figures; an inspirational deathbed speech; endless explosions; retcon timeline-rearranging; post-credits teasers.

It’s probably too much to hope for a superhero flick that, y’know, doesn’t employ such clichés, so, until then, we can at least enjoy a film that so delights in breaking the fourth wall, letting you know when it’s the rock-bottom moment, when you’re being served “a huge steaming bowl of foreshadowing”, that a best-laid plan is unlikely to work due to its place in the second act, and that even death, in this genre, is something that can be wound back (shouts to next year’s Avengers 4, which’ll turn back time, only without the lulz).

In a genre in which there’s no real gravity, Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and star/co-writer Ryan Reynolds have shown that levity plays best. Deadpool 2 is a bloody, very violent, murderous rampage, yet all its moments of trauma are played as slapstick; the tone determinedly screwball, a host of its deaths amongst the film’s biggest laughs. Throughout all this horrific mayhem, there’s the rapidfire, spray-of-jokes approach of a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker rumpus, only with a nastier, more satirical edge; the film at its funniest, and its best, when it’s taking aim at comic-books, comic-book movies, and box office competitors.

“We’re the X-Men, a dated metaphor for racism in the ’60s,” Reynolds says, upon arriving at a stand-off in day-saving mode, having been made a ‘trainee’ member of the mutant family in whose larger ‘universe’ he dwells. Even better is when he asks Josh Brolin “you’re so dark, are you sure you’re not from the DC universe?”, a much-needed laugh for anyone who sat through the laughless Suicide Squad. And given Brolin is currently starring in another superhero film you may’ve heard of, you bet there’s a gag, herein, where he’s called Thanos (on such a theme: Zazie Beetz, debuting as Domino, gets called “Black Black Widow” and “Brown Panther”).

The screenplay is so conversant in pop-culture and movie trash —from Batman v Superman to The Passion Of The Christ, Interview With A Vampire, The Proposition, Yentil, and Frozen— that Deadpool 2 feels like it speaks internet; madcap free-associative whimsy leading to unlikely comic riffs and artful collisions of crap (another trope at play, here: the so-bad-it’s-good soundtrack).

All of these gags need a narrative to be hung on, and, so: Deadpool (Reynolds) battles Cable (Brolin) over the fate of Firefist (yes, many jokes are made about this terrible superhero name). He’s the kid-in-peril of the central dramatic arc, and is played by Julian Dennison, essentially running back his Hunt For The Wilderpeople character, only with more CGI fireballs. To save him, the titular character has to assemble a gang, recruiting a host of mutants to become X-Force; the cliché of the standalone movie laying the terrain for a forthcoming team-up movie duly mocked as it happens.

When these various IPs are gathered together, they come in as if at an audition, with glossy black-and-white headshots and reductive introductions to who they are. Deadpool 2 doesn’t turn the film into a commentary on filmmaking; a meta-sequel in the way, say, 22 Jump Street did, but there’re gags about this movie’s budget, and the box office of the original flick.

This means that the cold realities of franchise instalments are openly acknowledged; audiences knowing all too well, by this point of Sebastian Stan’s nine-film contract, how the superhero sausage is made. By doing so, with a wink and gag, Deadpool 2 dodges the potholes of the genre, coming off as pleasingly flippant even as it does the Universe-making dirty-work. In all its mirth and mania, this a grand example of a popcorn picture that manages to have its cake and eat it too.