Deadpool 2 leaves no stone un-deconstructed: the naughty man-child of the X-Men universe who manages to beat them at their own game.

 

After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Miami's hottest bartender, while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor - finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World's Best Lover.

Rating:
R (for strong violence and language throughout, sexual references and brief drug material)

Genre:
Action & Adventure, Comedy

Directed By:
David Leitch

Written By:
Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Ryan Reynolds

In Theaters:
May 18, 2018 wide

Runtime:
119 minutes

Studio:
Twentieth Century Fox

 

 

Having been away at the Cannes Film Festival for the past two weeks, the one biggie I missed (due to the fact that 20th Century Fox didn’t screen it until I was in France) was Deadpool 2. But like many others, I caught the Marvel sequel in a real theater with real people, not critics, over the weekend, and now in this post-opening review I get to do a little Monday morning quarterbacking.

As I say in my video review above, Deadpool is the funniest, raunchiest and most entertaining of any character in the Marvel Universe, and this sequel does nothing to change my view about that. A lot of jokes in Deadpool 2 are thrown against the wall, and even if the freshness of the original can’t be replicated, most of them work. I found myself laughing out loud at much of this and so did the audience I saw it with — although a lot of the rat-a-tat tat delivery from star Ryan Reynolds necessarily sails over your head on first viewing. This is the movie that puts the comic in comic book, and in the hands of screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick ,along with credited co-writer Reynolds, they get this aspect of the Marvel money-minting franchise just right.

The so-called villain of this sequel is a time-travelling cyborg named Cable, played by Josh Brolin, and if you confuse him for Thanos in the week’s No. 2 film, Avengers: Infinity War, there is a reason as both are Brolin characters with some similar characteristics. Brolin has great presence and apparently has decided to move his career into comic book movies — at least on the basis of his 2018 output so far. Among other characters, T.J. Miller is back as the bartender at Sister Margaret’s, who sends Wade/Deadpool out on his missions but doesn’t make much of an impression this time around.