Cinemutants - Deadpool 2 (2018)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2018, it’s Deadpool 2. After a personal tragedy, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) finally enlists with the X-Men before running afoul of the time traveler Cable (Josh Brolin), who has come from the future to stop a killer before he murders Cable’s family. With his methods meeting the disapproval of Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Deadpool decides to form his own team – the X-Force.

1. F#@% Wolverine. Deadpool 2 opens with a music box reenacting Wolverine’s death at the end of Logan, and watching the two movies nearly back-to-back was especially entertaining. If this Deadpool is aware that (a) Wolverine has died, it’ll be intriguing to see how he reacts to working with another Logan from another world. And where the first Deadpool film poked gentle fun at Hugh Jackman, Deadpool 2 primes their inevitable team-up with a post-credits gag in the Super Duper Extended Cut. In the theatrical cut, Deadpool shoots the Wade Wilson from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the extended cut gives him more dialogue: “Look, eventually, you’re going to hang up the claws, and it’s gonna make a lot of people very sad. But one day, your old pal Wade’s gonna ask you to get back in the saddle again. And when he does, say yes.” Oddly prescient? Or just throwing down the gauntlet? In the way that the first film’s post-credits name-checked Cable, this one feels like Deadpool marking his territory (a pun I’m sure he would appreciate).
2. Just cleaning up the timelines. After swiping and repairing Cable’s time-travel device, Deadpool goes around time-hopping (or, as they call it in the comics, “body-sliding”), saving Vanessa’s life while killing Ryan Reynolds circa 2011. (In the Super Duper cut, he also pays a visit to baby Hitler.) With the TVA playing a role in the trailers, I can’t believe this flagrant continuity manipulation won’t be an issue for them. On the flip side, we reunite with two mutants in the post-Days of Future Past timeline – Yukio (Shioli Kutsana) and the Juggernaut (an uncredited and CGI-assisted Ryan Reynolds). Before this rewatch, I’d entirely forgotten that this is our second franchise Yukio, and in fairness it’s entirely possible this is a different Yukio from The Wolverine’s Rila Fukushima. (This one has an electrified whip, not precognition.) Still, it might be fun to see both Yukios on screen in a few weeks. Meanwhile, this Juggernaut is a fair case of “less is more”; rather than spout dated internet memes, this Juggernaut is a marked improvement, all force and demolition just for the hell of it. 
3. Our group will be forward-thinking. One of Deadpool 2’s best jokes is even funnier given how much the trailers played up the existence of X-Force. Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, Vanisher – the trailer made it look like these C-listers would be headlining the film, and in a world where Groot made a billion dollars, it wasn’t inconceivable. So to watch nearly all of them die horrible, grisly deaths to the spiraling guitar licks of “Thunderstruck” is still outrageously funny. It’s unlikely Marvel will get around to many (if any) of these characters; though the surviving Domino (Zazie Beetz) hasn’t been announced yet for Deadpool & Wolverine, I’d be amazed if she’s not involved. While the film teases that the whole thing was franchise bait for Josh Brolin’s multi-film contract, I do recall some buzz about a proper X-Force film before Disney bought the store. (Meanwhile, Deadpool cracks a joke that both anticipates and deflates a major beat from next week’s film. Like and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss that post.)
4. Essex House. Another film, another Mister Sinister tease that never materialized. The crux of the film centers around the violent mutant rehabilitation at the Essex House, run by Eddie Marsan’s sadistic and nameless Headmaster. Marsan isn’t playing Sinister, whose real name is Nathaniel Essex, but his gene therapy/torture at a home for wayward mutants is exactly the kind of scheme that might embroil Marvel’s leading eugenicist. This Sinister tease also plants the seeds for a deeper interconnectedness that never came to pass; having already seen Essex goons steal Wolverine’s DNA, and with one more Sinister tease yet to come (but left, as I recall, on the cutting room floor), this film posits the Essex House as a kind of anti-Xavier’s academy, with Domino realizing that she was raised in this selfsame orphanage. (There’s even a pointed cameo from Luke Roessler, who plays the young David Haller on Legion, implying a backdoor connection with the TV series.) Was Mister Sinister poised to be the next big baddie of the X-Men franchise, with a fertile story reason to introduce, oh, perhaps some “new mutants’?
5. Zip it, Thanos! As I watched Josh Brolin play Cable (perfect casting, really, even as the movie hangs a lantern on the difference in stature), I flashed back to all the doubling and recasts we’ve seen in the MCU so far. Gemma Chan, Alfre Woodard, Patton Oswalt, Michelle Yeoh... and that’s not even counting folks like Tara Strong who’ve voiced multiple roles. Is it inconceivable that Brolin – notorious for playing franchise archvillain Thanos – might reprise the part of Cable once the mutants make the jump to Marvel proper? Deadpool’s already made “the” joke, and Thanos being fully CGI probably helps; plus, the older Cable gets, the more the character works in opposition to meeting his parents in his past (spoilers, he’s Nathan Summers, the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). You could even have some fun with the fact that he’s a refugee from a dead timeline; his present no longer exists, especially if the Fox timeline is walled off, destroyed, or pruned at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine. At the very least, it’d be a shame not to see him one last time, given that he’s heretofore unaware that Deadpool repaired (and abused) his technology. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: what’s a Deadpool to do when the TVA turns up at his door? Up next, the phoenix rises one more time for an X-sunset, a metaphor that’s holding together about as well as the rest of Dark Phoenix.