Deadpool 2 reminded me of old Mel Brooks movies, like Robin
Hood: Men in Tights and Airplane! Those movies were family-friendly, but they
were also non-stop farces that made fun of everything and everyone, including
Mel Brooks himself. In his movies, nothing is sacred and everyone can be mocked,
from the characters to the actors themselves, along with the movie’s own plot
and setting as well as any other headline that was popular at the time. You
couldn’t be part of a Mel Brooks production unless you were self-deprecating enough.
Of course, Mel Brooks movies weren’t nearly as offensive or
as violent as Deadpool or Deadpool 2. It’s almost like they decided to make an
over-the-top meta horror movie and ridiculed itself for making one in the first
place, all while placing it under the banner of Marvel comics. Of course, this
was Deadpool’s schtick from the comics as well, talking to the reader and
laughing at everyone. To see it as a movie is something entirely different,
though, because how many times in a superhero flick are people shredded to death
and that’s the joke? It’s like a compendium of horrible impulses that tells you
how bad they are but oh they’re so bad, it’s delightful. There’s a certain
glee to it that only Ryan Reynolds can bring, a true happiness in making fun of
everyone for being so damn intolerant of his inability to stop himself from
doing something terrible.
The plot is pretty thin and stupid. A Russian gangster kills
Deadpool’s girlfriend, which makes him depressed and suicidal, only he can’t
kill himself no matter how hard he tries. He ends up back with Colossus at the
X-Mansion, who tries to snap him out of it by making him a trainee member of
the X-Men. Things end poorly when Deadpool tries to settle down a teen mutant
at a boarding school who’s threatening to light everyone up in flames because
he’s been abused by the headmaster and the staff. Thereafter, he tries to make
it up to the kid before Cable, traveling through time to save his family, kills
the kid first. It sounds like there’s some real emotion to be mined, but the
entire thing is really a ruse to laugh at how stupid and fun (stupidly fun?) it
all is. That Deadpool can’t be killed ever makes for some fun gross-out gags
throughout the whole thing, all of which I can’t possibly spoil without ruining
the film, and they don’t shy away from unabashedly killing off anyone that’s
not a central character in the goriest, most obscene ways. The whole movie is
laughing at you for enjoying such perversion and depravity.
Deadpool 2 does add a small layer of comicbook meta humor as
well, with jokes that only make sense if you’ve followed the X-Men films and
some quirky one-liners like “no more speaking lines for you.” Setting up these
gags with such an excessively, comedically violent tone makes for something
more than a mere splatterfest. It’s a wink to those who know, deep in their
hearts, that the Marvel movies are big, dumb things where superheroes get to
bash each other into oblivion to save somebody from something for one reason or
another. They even integrate that idea seamlessly into the movie itself, with
Cable playing the straight man seemingly teleported right out of any other
Marvel movie and into Deadpool’s world, full of dicks and cocaine and mayhem.
It’s what makes this so much better than horror comedies that use gore without
any real purpose for it other than LOOK, DISMEMBERED LIMBS, FUNNY RIGHT? That self-awareness goes a long way, even if
it’s annoying and belligerent.
If you’re an obnoxious person (who isn’t, AMIRITE?!), this
movie will cater to your tastes. Yes, it tries way too hard, but that’s the fun
of it. It knows that it’s trying too hard and keeps chugging along with more
one-liners, spewing them out like bile without really caring about anything,
continuity be damned. I read somewhere that Ryan Reynolds isn’t interested in
doing another sequel. It’s a shame because of all the Marvel and DC movies
coming out—at least 3 major ones in any given year, and probably more now that
Disney owns Fox—the franchise that truly understands the meaning of this film
genre isn’t the Avengers, Black Panther, or Spider-Man; it’s Deadpool.
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