Is 'Deadpool 2' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
Director Tim Miller's "Deadpool" (2016) came at the right time to lampoon the ascendancy of the superhero blockbuster genre, and in doing so became a blockbuster itself. Does the follow-up, directed by David Leitch ("John Wick," "Atomic Blonde") keep things fresh and funny or does it succumb to sequel-itis? Here's what critics have to say:
There Are Four Or Five Different Things 'Deadpool 2' Rushes Through To Set The Stage For Its Plot
Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), aka Deadpool, has settled into something resembling normalcy, spending his days dispatching villains — what he lacks in crime-fighting panache, he makes up for with mutant healing powers that allow him to recover from gunshot wounds and worse — and his nights cozying up to Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), the love of his life. But some terrible things happen, leaving a depressed Deadpool to crash on the couch at Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
[The Wrap]
Soon, Wade is rendered powerless and thrown into prison alongside a young pyrokinetic mutant named Russell (Hunt for the Wilderpeople's Julian Dennison). With his healing abilities gone, Wade would prefer to wallow in his angst and simply fade away, but when a time-traveling cybernetic soldier named Cable (a grim Josh Brolin) arrives from the future with murder on his mind, Wade is drawn into donning the Deadpool mask once again. This time, however, he decides to recruit some allies to fight alongside him in his own superhero group: X-Force.
Hope You Like Lots And Lots Of Pop Culture References
Its obvious models (referenced several times) are the sci-fi films and thrillers of Paul Verhoeven, filled with blood, guts, gratuitous nudity, and caustic satire. But Deadpool 2 is too winking and too spotty to pull of a Verhoeven-esque tightrope act.
It's Family Guy: The Movie. Or, technically I suppose, it's Family Guy 2: Here Are Some More Mentions Of Other, Tangentially Related Things You Recognize And Like.
[NPR]
One moment the character, and the film, are actively surprising the audience, squeezing out laughs at a rapid clip. Other times, it's like watching yet another Deadpool commercial or TV spot, with his bro-humor schtick growing less interesting with every passing quip.
'Deadpool 2' Unironically — Gasp — Incorporates Some Superhero Cliches And Melodrama
With Reynolds' charismatic irreverence at its core, the pic moves from bloody mayhem to lewd comedy and back fluidly, occasionally even making room to go warm and mushy. On the latter front, the filmmakers walk a fine line between embracing Deadpool's mock-everything appeal and needing to make Wade a credible, emotional human.
By the time the film settles into its primary storyline, the narrative suffers from a certain amount of whiplash, and it's only after about another 20 minutes that the audience has some sense of where the hell this is going.
Cable's got good reason to be bummed out, as we learn, but the film barely gives us any time to process his tragic backstory. So it's just kind of there, slowly getting buried underneath an avalanche of butt jokes and superhero snark.
[Mashable]
Amid all that overdue and well-deserved scorn, the lone aspect of Deadpool 2 that is treated with gravid, wet-eyed sincerity — the thing the film wants us to care most deeply about, that acts as the plot's triggering action — is itself the biggest, oldest, dumbest and most useless superhero-genre cliche of them all.
[NPR]
The Cast Is Pretty Good, But Zazie Beetz's Domino Is The X-Force Member To Watch For
Wade Wilson still feels like the role Ryan Reynolds was born to play, and Reynolds continues to give this character everything he's got. Other characters you liked from the last film resurface, too, including Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Dopinder the cab driver (Karan Soni). (So, unfortunately, does Weasel, played by T.J. Miller, whose recent offscreen antics probably help explain why not a single person in my theater laughed at any of his scenes.)
[Mashable]
Among the newcomers, Beetz provides a great deal of enjoyment as a superhero whose charmed life is weaponized against anyone who might come at her. Brolin, on the other hand, feels as one-note here as he is in "Avengers: Infinity War"; the only juicy villainy comes from Marsan's creepy mutant-hater.
[The Wrap]
The standout is franchise newbie Zazie Beetz as the butt-kicking Domino, whose primary superhero skill is luck ("not very cinematic," says Deadpool, just as Leitch unspools an on-screen representation of Domino's gift that giddily upends that assessment).
You'll Probably Love 'Deadpool 2' For Its Humor And Absurdity… Provided You Loved The First One
There are, it is only fair to note, actual jokes in Deadpool 2 — sincere, crafted, legitimately funny gags that are clearly the product of human thought and loving effort. There's … not a lot of those, but they're there if you look, and should you happen across one, it will very likely delight you.
[NPR]
Your mileage will vary depending on how much patience you have for Deadpool's tireless antics and how easily you are entertained by limb-severing, body-battering physical humor, the relentless parade of blue jokes about pranking coworkers with bodily fluids, infant genitalia, and the "Human Centipede" movies, and the spectacle of Reynolds flaming himself over how much "Green Lantern" sucked.
Deadpool's (and, by extension, Reynolds') wink-wink shtick is so indiscriminate that, as before, there's no way to get a beat on his—or his film's—moral compass. Random, inappropriate absurdity is all that matters in Deadpool 2, regardless of its narrative through-line about its main character's attempts to become a father figure to a surrogate clan all his own.
Leitch's Distinctive Action Directing Isn't Quite Suited To CG Superhero Nonsense
Whereas Leitch's John Wick and Atomic Blonde confirmed his gift for staging inventive and brutal genre clashes, Deadpool 2's set pieces are constructed with so much cross-cutting between various players that the auteur's trademark combat lucidity is somewhat lost.
[Leitch's] approach gives the action scenes and fight choreography in Deadpool 2 an undeniable sense of energy and fun, but for the most part the movie plays things straightforward. As a result, Deadpool 2 never feels quite as giddy as Miller's [Deadpool].
Blonde was deliberate pulp, but its fight scenes had a messy, bone-crunching veracity that DP2 mostly trades in for chaotic cartoon violence. There's a numbing sameness to the casual bloodshed here that makes the viewer almost long for the relative calm of the first film's lengthy pop culture digressions.
Make Sure You Stick Around For The Post-Credits Scenes
While its most delightful surprises are toward the beginning of the credit roll, it's worth sitting through to the end — especially for any viewer who was too distracted by the decapitations, fireballs and impalings of the final battle sequence to make out the lyrics of the Carmina Burana-ish chorus playing in the background.
Need more proof that "Deadpool 2" pushes way past its genre into actual subversion? Look no further than its bonkers mid-credits scene, one littered with references and cameos and callbacks that also, gasp, genuinely impacts (and maybe even forever changes) the entire movie that played before it. It's not just a dumping ground for tossed-off gags and vague references as to what's coming next, it's a world-changing dash that could easily have fit inside the film itself. Now that's different.
TL;DR
In "Deadpool 2," the manic antics fly fast, but the franchise loses its edge as wise-cracking antihero Deadpool goes dadcore, attempting to infuse standard-issue four-quadrant studio blockbuster beats into what was once a revolutionary R-rated premise.
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