Scalding Hot Takes: Deadpool 2

I recently re-watched Wag the Dog for my Fractured Mirror column on movies about movies over at TCM Backlot. It holds up for the most part, although Mamet’s subsequent, predictable de-evolution into a smug Conservative gives the movie’s snide cynicism and nihilism a bitter aftertaste. 

I had forgotten that Denis Leary appeared in the movie as a fad guru known, embarrassingly enough, as Fad King. The movie subsequently suffers from what I call the Denis Leary paradox: because Leary tries so very hard to be edgy and raw and is so astonishingly unsuccessful, no project with him can ever be as edgy or as raw as it wants to be, even a movie as smart and smartass as Wag the Dog. 

The surprise 2016 Marvel smash Deadpool suffered from the Denis Leary paradox. The movie tried desperately to be edgy and raw and revolutionary. It worked up such a sweat trying to a badass provocation unlike any superhero movie ever made that by definition it couldn't be as edgy and raw and punk rock as it wanted to be. 

As a pompous stuffed shirt, I'm offended by that title—and secretly impressed!

2 Live Crew, now they could be as nasty as they wanted to be. And they were! Many of their songs addressed controversial, provocative subjects such as sex outside of marriage. But because Deadpool was at once designed as a spitball squarely directed at the monocle-protected eye of propriety and a big-budget Marvel superhero movie with tentpole ambitions it was hopelessly compromised, a movie that offered an R-rated, profane, gleefully post-modern, meta, fourth wall-shattering take on the superhero genre while nevertheless hitting many of the exact same story and thematic beats as every comic book movie ever. 

Deadpool 2 consequently has an enormous, almost unfair advantage over its predecessor. Since Deadpool was one of the biggest box-office surprises in film history, it does not need to convince audiences that this Deadpool guy is not your parent’s superhero but rather something never seen before, a kung fu hippie from gangster city, a rapping surfer who’s half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli. 

That’s an awful tall order for any actor or movie. That’s true even of Reynolds, an actor who had previously appeared in previous comic book-derived movies The Green Lantern, Blade 3, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, R.I.P.D as well as Paper Man, where he played a fictional superhero. 

For months before its release, Deadpool was shoved down the throats of the moviegoing audiences. The hype was unrelenting, the press blitz ubiquitous. It was relentlessly drilled into the public consciousness that the latest and most outrageous superhero movie ever would be as incendiary, provocative and shocking as a Denis Leary rant from the 1990s, the kind he delivered while aggressively smoking cigarettes even though they’re known to cause lung cancer. 

A lot of you young bucks are too young to remember the full impact of Denis Leary in the 1990s. He was like The Sex Pistols, Lenny Bruce, Milo Yiannopolis, Magritte, David Bowie, Tyler the Creator and Nat Turner if they were a derivative straight white man shamelessly ripping off Bill Hicks’ persona. 

The first Deadpool was like Denis Leary in the 1990s. It broadcasted its edginess in a way that prevented it from ever being truly, genuinely edgy. 

Holy shit, now Deadpool is taking over DVD boxes for movies he had nothing to do with! That motherfucker is as crazy as Denis Leary in the 1990s! 

Despite the Dresden carpet bombing-style ad blitz for Deadpool, I did not see it until well after a year after it came out, when I wrote about it for Lukewarm Takes. I expected to love it or hate it, ,to find it badass and hilarious or tired and exhausting. Instead, I thought that it was perfectly okay. It was fine. I derived all manner of mild enjoyment from it. I was hoping that it would be in the top tier of Marvel movies, right up there with Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, both Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Shane Black’s Iron Man 3 (which is so Shane Black that I feel like it would be doing him a disservice to merely describe it as a Marvel movie). Alas, it was more like Ant-Man and Doctor Strange in that it wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t anything I felt the need to ever re-watch. 

Thankfully, Deadpool 2 is the rare sequel that’s substantially better than the original. In that respect, the movie echoes the arc of the Wolverine stand-alone movies that introduced Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, albeit in a way that made everyone angry, Ryan Reynolds most of all. The first Wolverine solo movie was rightly disparaged garbage that came close to ruining two of Marvel’s most audacious Canuck anti-heroes in Wolverine and Deadpool. 

The next Deadpool and Wolverine solo movies represented a big step up, quality-wise, and the third represents an equally massive leap forward. 

Now he's giving the business to Norman Rockwell! Deadpool, you so crazy! 

Working from a script co-written by returning screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and first-time screenwriter Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool 2 finds its wisecracking anti-hero in a suicidal funk after he’s unable to stop a bullet that kills soul mate Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), right when they were on the verge of starting a family. 

Without Vanessa, Deadpool is even more violent, nihilistic and self-destructive than usual but he eventually finds something worth fighting for when he befriends Rusty Collins (Julian Dennison). Rusty is a chubby fourteen year old so he’s overflowing with rage at everyone and everything in a way that only highlights his desperate longing for family, connection and acceptance. 

In that respect I found the character all too relatable except that he’s also a rage-filled mutant with the power to emit fire from his fists. The two outcasts end up in a sinister prison for mutants before Deadpool finds himself trying to protect the incendiary juvenile delinquent from Cable, a time-traveling super-solider from the future who bears a possibly legally actionable resemblance to various Terminators, just as Deadpool 2 feels more than a little like the superior first two Terminator films. 

I applaud the casting of Josh Brolin as Cable. After all, we haven’t seen him play an iconic comic book character in a gazillion dollar instant blockbuster in nearly a month, since he played Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. All kidding aside, Brolin is good and distinctive and different enough in both films to justify the surreal redundancy of the same goddamn actor playing massive roles in blockbusters mere weeks apart. 

It makes sense that Brolin played a young Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black 3 and co-starred opposite him in his career-making turn in No Country for Old Men because like Jones, Brolin brings an automatic authenticity to every role he plays, a no frills, no-nonsense conviction that makes you believe whatever he says and does, no matter how ridiculous or absurd. That's particularly important when you're playing a morally complex, conflicted robo-soldier from the future in a comic book movie. 

Brolin’s brawny physicality and stoic masculinity perfectly suit the part. Cable is a super-powered iron fisted punch of a man but Brolin brings a real sense of gravitas to the role along with a powerful melancholy. Like Deadpool, he’s a warrior who has lost everything that mattered to him. They're at once antithetical and simpatico figures.  

#Spoiler!

Deadpool toys with becoming an X-Men, something that reunites him with Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) a big hearted, metallic Russian engaged in an eternal battle for Deadpool’s soul and sour teenaged superhero Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). Superhero movies are disconcertingly devoid of openly gay characters, so I suppose Deadpool 2 deserves a very small amount of credit for the lazy bravery of having Negasonic Teenage Warhead say, “Hey, this is my girlfriend Yukio” and having Deadpool respond, “Great. Good for you!” 

When things with the X-Men don’t pan out, he opens an alternate group of crime-fighting mutants called the X-Force. In their original incarnation, they’re more Mystery Men than X-Men. I can’t say I was terribly surprised by their fate, as I’ve learned to see the increasingly popular comedy trope of a badass team being assembled only to fail almost instantly, and in horrifying and surprising ways, coming but I was amused all the same.

Of the folks Deadpool and sidekick Weasel (T.J Miller) recruit, the one who ends up mattering the most is Domino, a preternaturally lucky badass played by Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz in a hilarious, scene-stealing turn that continues Marvel’s Renaissance of Women of Color alongside Thor: Ragnorak’s Valkyrie and the women of Wakanda. 

How long will it be until one of these remarkable women gets a vehicle of their own? Domino would be a fantastic place to start.

Deadpool 2 ratchets up the meta-textual comedy of the first film. It is, among other things, a running commentary on the ever-evolving state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the D.C Cinematic Universe, the comic book world and the X-Men movies. Deadpool is like a cross between Bugs Bunny, Deadshot and the Phantom of the Opera. He exists outside of the story as well as inside it. He can comment on it and communicate directly with us via narration and has all manner of extra-textual information about everyone involved. 

These non-stop winks to the audience should take us out of the story and undercut the powerful emotions at play but they seldom do. The earnest, sincere melodrama and manic meta comedy should work against each other; instead they complement each other. 

Deadpool 2 succeeds smashingly as both an official sequel to Deadpool and a spiritual successor to John Wick. The sequel shares a director with Keanu Reeves’ instant cult classic about a bad, bad man who kills a whole bunch of even worse men to get vengeance for a very good dog, although stuntman-turned-auteur David Leitch’s co-direction of John Wick was uncredited. 

John Wick and Deadpool 2 share a lot more than just Leitch. On one level, both guy-friendly bloodbaths are about charismatic loners who kill small nation’s worths of bad guys, many professional killers, in legitimately cool ways. On another, they’re about lost men doomed to walk the Earth as ghosts of vengeance after everything they love has been violently taken from them. They’re about grief. They’re about loss. They’re about mourning and they’re about overwhelming, soul-consuming despair. 

The thematic similarities extend even further. John Wick and Deadpool 2 are about communities of violent men who make their living through murder but also kill for deeply personal reasons. There’s a wonderfully lived-in quality to both movies, a sense that these characters have always been around, getting drunk, maneuvering darkly and killing people for business and also pleasure. 

There’s something deeply sad, no, tragic about Wade Wilson that no amount of meta-textual riffing and adolescent naughtiness can hide. Wade's snarkiness and bottomless despair are intertwined. Deadpool’s brash irreverence is a fuck you to a world that insists that he never stop suffering. 

Is it any wonder Deadpool is suicidal? Like my man Denis Leary back in the 1990s, when he was straight up OWNING society with his blistering observations, Deadpool knows that there’s no cure for Cancer. Unlike Leary, he has Cancer (although one could certainly argue, and I will, extensively, elsewhere that Leary and all his fellow truth tellers are, in fact, dealing with a cancer known as political correctness!) and also he’s horrifically burned and at one point he has a baby’s legs and penis and his reason for living was violently murdered. He’s going through some heavy shit, is what I'm saying.  

Reynolds is a good enough actor that Wade Wilson’s pain and despair and confusion register as strongly, and are as important to the character and his performance, as the fourth wall-shattering sassiness and boyish irreverence that hasn’t just made ol’ Pool a bona fide pop culture icon but have transcended the movie and bled all over pop culture.

Go to a store, any store, and Deadpool’s face will literally be on every product. Go to church and Deadpool will be delivering the sermon. I went to visit my grandfather’s grave and all of the tombstones were defaced with Deadpool’s logo. I mean, sure, it’s fun, if a little disrespectful, but it’s getting to be a little much. 

Deadpool was guilty of the minor aesthetic crime of trying too hard. That’s much less of a problem with its superior sequel, which is comfortable enough in its own outrageousness, and underlying substance, that it doesn't need to exert quite so much furious effort to be cool, and clever and subversive. 

The hype for Deadpool was so ridiculously, comically over-the-top, to the point where it became a huge target for satire itself, including a hilarious episode of Hollywood Handbook, that seemingly no movie could live up to it, no matter how kickass or awesome. That might still be true of Deadpool 2 but it comes pretty damn close. 

Or as my friend early 1990s-era Denis Leary might say, pretty fucking close. 

Y’all know the deal: like Denis Leary and Deadpool I’m a crazy rebel sticking it to the “Man” and consequently am unemployable and make most of my income from Patreon so if y’all wanted to consider pledging even a dollar over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace that’d be great and I’d really appreciate it.