Deadpool 2 (2018)

From its opening salvo on Logan to postcredits potshots at movies I guarantee you’ve probably forgotten, Deadpool 2 wastes not a moment in reminding us that it’s the “bad boy” of the superhero genre, the riotous class clown not afraid to point out the absurdities and shortcomings that our favorite genre often exhibits. And yet Deadpool 2 manages to find a heart amid all its chaos – even if, as Deadpool’s love chides him, it looks like it’s in the wrong place.

Ryan Reynolds returns to the red spandex as Deadpool, hitman for hire, whose domestic bliss with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) is interrupted by his own murder sprees and the appearance of a time-traveling badass named Cable (Josh Brolin). Between an ersatz internship as an X-Man (with Stefan Kapičić and Brianna Hildebrand returning as Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, respectively) and forming his own X-Force team, Deadpool starts to learn that “family” isn’t just an F-word.

My immediate reaction to Deadpool 2 is that I like it better than the first, though I contend part of that difference is the absolute glut of trailers for the first film compared to a relative (and to a large degree self-imposed) drought for the second. There are lots of surprises in Deadpool 2, from metatextual references to surprise appearances from the source material. Ray Donovan fans might even be surprised to see Eddie Marsan crop up as one of the film’s antagonists. The real surprise, though, is that Deadpool 2 doesn’t just retread and overplay the successes of the first Deadpool film. Instead, it finds a way to expand the Deadpool world by bringing in a few new characters and ideas without losing sight of that irreverent brand of self-reflexive humor. If the next film is, as we’ve been led to expect, an X-Force outing, fans will be thrilled to see more of newcomers Cable and Domino (Zazie Beetz), who fit into their characters comfortably and with great cinematic flair.

What’s particularly interesting about Deadpool 2 is its pervading air of the unexpected and the postmodern fun Deadpool has with that novelty. In a scene that feels like an extended metaphor, Deadpool careens around the X-Mansion, playing with familiar props and wrecking the scenery, as if to bring life to the notion that he’s the franchise wild child, and Reynolds is delightful as this unrestrained super-id. He’s clearly having a ball with the part, which translates to uproarious laughs from the audience. But one senses also that Reynolds is frankly stunned at how successful the first film was, a sentiment that carries over into moments like the one early on, in which a stunned Deadpool notes that he’s the star of a film that’s literally spoken about in the same sentence as Jesus Christ (Deadpool famously jousted with Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ for R-rated box office records). It’s a great gag but also a bemused “how’d this happen” moment that no one could have predicted.

Speaking of unpredictable, I was astonished to see the sheer number of characters packed into the film, particularly the ones of whom I’ve never even heard. I’m pretty deep into this stuff, but there are quite a few figures from the X-Universe unfamiliar to anyone who’s not a diehard X-Fan of the 1980s and early ’90s. (For good measure, Deadpool tosses in a joke about the art style of the last generation’s X-comics.) The film cleverly manages not to overpack itself, recognizing which characters to develop and which to throw away on a well-timed gag. And boy, are those gags expertly deployed, introduced in an offhanded way that doesn’t foreshadow their reoccurrence but which do manage to get funnier each time they’re echoed. On top of the jokes that are developed over the course of this movie, there are a staggering number of jokes built on moments from the first film – par for the course for a densely referential character like Deadpool, yes, but a true testament to the way that the filmmakers trust the audience to keep up. One could imagine a lazier version of this film that telegraphs each callback by having Deadpool remark on it, but instead Deadpool 2 plops them in, assuming you’ll remember the gags but recontextualizing them well enough for those who don’t pore over these movies like sacred religious texts. (Which, y’know, I do.)

There’s really only one joke in the film that runs on too long, but it’s near the end (no spoilers) and the joke ends up becoming about how long the joke is going on. It’s a gag that wallops another superhero movie in the best National Lampoon tradition of parody, and it’s one of the only times in recent memory that I can recall being successfully pummeled into submission by a single punchline. I recognized immediately that it was also simultaneously a callback to one of the first jokes in the film, and so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see the film go there, but what did end up surprising me was the fact that the film manages to land a truly heartfelt emotional beat on the heels of a tired-til-it’s-funny gag-o-rama. In a film that’s never afraid to deploy lazy writing and then hang a lantern on it, in a film that never fails to pratfall over a punchline, it was a real thrill to see Deadpool 2 stick the emotional landing in a way that manages to humanize a character who’s all too easy to reduce to a manic pixie one-liner. Deadpool 2 is one of that rare breed of sequels that manages to surprise – and perhaps even outdo its predecessor – by keeping sight of the old yet accessing something new about a character with a striking number of narrative layers.

Deadpool 2 is rated for “strong violence and language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug material.” Directed by David Leitch. Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Ryan Reynolds. Based on the Marvel Comics by Fabian Nicieza and Rob Liefeld. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, and Brianna Hildebrand.