Darkly Dreaming Demographic.

So I watched deadpool 2 last night and I really didn’t feel like doing a whole review on it really because it was just kinda ‘meh’ (but then I did haha). Like it wasn’t a real movie, the first one I didn’t find to be mindblowing but it had a beginning/middle and end, a decent albeit made up villain (well all villains are made up but I mean he isn’t in the comics as far as I know).

DP2 has none of those things, and it just seems to be spinning it’s wheels from beginning to end churning out cringy gay and “edgy” jokes that were only half funny the first time and of course all the good jokes were in the trailer as usual. People just need to stop making trailers haha.

I just felt the whole movie was like a dog chasing it’s tail, it got really excited from the success of the first one so they upped the budget and just ran with it but they really had no idea what they were doing and it just goes around in circles.

I was like an hour into the movie waiting for the story to start because it just felt like it was dicking around and then I saw that it was a pretty good length so I wasn’t that worried but the ending was just really unsatisfying because it basically ends where it begins and I hate that shit (looking at you quiet place).

It sucks because it has some nice set pieces, like the prison, but they literally spend two minutes there which was really disappointing because prison movies especially sci fi prison movies are a guilty pleasure of mine. And the whole point of the prison section was to set up a character that was sort of a let down honestly.

Gonna go to spoiler town now so don’t read this next part. The prison bit is to establish the juggernaut. Which was a cool reveal that wasn’t ruined by the trailer but was ruined by the juggernaut haha.

He’s basically supposed to be the villain stand in for Cable, because Cable is touted as the villain but he’s not, he might as well be wearing a sign that says “Will turn good”. So the juggernaut shows up and all he really does is spout one liners and hit people, really bad one liners mainly about shoving things up people’s butts and turning people into cock rings. Just really unfunny and cringy lines that made me long to see Vinny Jones return.

Then he’s beaten by collosus who shoves a power cable up his butt. That was one of the points in this movie when I was like ‘am I watching a Wayans brothers parody movie?’ I don’t care if deadpool does weird shit that’s deadpool but when you have collossus shoving things up people’s asses you’ve just lost the tone of your movie and it’s just too absurd to take seriously at all. When throughout the first movie and the start of this movie they walk a really nice line between the absurd and the actual marvel universe, juxtaposing them perfectly.
And what’s worse is there’s so much set up to Juggernaut showing up only to fall flat on his face, the whole prison sequence is really on there to set up Cable as a villain and foreshadow juggernaut and it fails at both making those scenes totally pointless.

*End of the spoilers*

I didn’t buy Cable for one second as the villain and neither does the movie really. When he’s introduced in the prison sequence he’s fighting the guards in this really ultra violent gory movie without a single drop of blood. I noticed, he was basically just stunning these prison guards and I’m supposed to believe this guy is a villain when he can’t even kill these faceless guards in a shady mutant super prison, nah.

I loved all the terminator references though, I felt they really worked and the movie visually is very nice but I think structurally the film is a mess and they should have better copied terminator really. It basically rips off terminator and looper but it’s like it doesn’t even get the best bits. It completely misses what made those movies good, which was believable and intimidating villains. The movie copies the looper/terminator premise of a time traveller sent back to kill a child but the difference is in both those movies I believe the assassin will kill the child. You have no doubt in your mind that in both cases that’s what will happen because Bruce Willis’ character in Looper already does it one scene and in Terminator one and two it’s a soulless machine who’s only purpose is that mission. So the stakes are set from the get, this child is headed for a meat grinder and the heroes have to stop it, but not for one moment did this movie make me believe that Cable actually would kill the kid so it was totally toothless.

Ok so the story is basically dp has to save this kid from Cable who’s from the future and is trying to kill the kid because in the future he turns out to be a villain who kills Cable’s family. Straight out of terminator but it’s a good set up.

The only problem is they don’t copy terminator hard enough and send a villain back from the future to stop Cable and thus the whole movie falls apart because there’s no threat really other than the kid himself.

So essentially the only villain in this movie is a little fat kid. Oh my god I’m literally shaking haha.

I really don’t know why they didn’t totally rip off terminator and send the kids future self back to be the villain this movie sorely needed. They spent the time and money to cast a guy to play the role of his future self, why not use him? It just makes perfect sense since there’s no strong driving force in the movie at all to have him play a central role in the film. Say what you will about Francis from the first movie but he was a villain, he wasn’t an anti-hero or an anti-villain, he was a straight up villain and he made the movie work because he was the perfect straight man to dp’s funny man.

But this movie is so unbalanced its just laughable. And all the time and effort they spent maintaining the tone is just pissed away towards the end. This juxtaposed to the excellent villain of Thanos in infinity war is just even more stark and it illustrates how important a good villain in a story is.

Another example of this I bring up all the time is Robocop vs the remake. In the first movie the villains are really well defined and you follow them throughout the movie in the remake, the villain shows up to kill him and then disappears for the rest of the movie so you can have this boring drawn out training sequence to then they reappear at the end to die.

Cable has development in the movie but you never for one second buy him as the villain which is just too perfect comparing this to his role as Thanos which made that movie for me. So it’s not Brolin’s performance that’s to fault here, it’s entirely down to direction and writing. And honestly I couldn’t imagine a better Cable just like now I can’t imagine a better Thanos.

The story, well there kind of isn’t one, that’s that out of the way. Cable want kid dead cos bad future, Deadpool not want kid dead cos redemption?
That’s pretty much it, there were points in the movie that just reached points of parody and that’s sort of what this franchise is trying to do, straddle the fence between serious super hero movie and parody, but in this case it just failed at that, when before it succeeded. I think the comedy and silliness is good when and it works when it’s measured by seriousness and stakes and action that wasn’t in this movie.

I don’t think it’s a bad movie, the shitty jokes aside, I think the only time I laughed was at the goonies jokes and I saw those in the trailer. I thought it was entertaining and I think it had a lot of potential it just missed the mark for me. That being said I hope they keep making them, despite me saying I hope comic book superhero movies would just stop and go away. A cable deadpool movie with a decent story could work really well.

It just didn’t this time. I’m definitely not saying this movie is bad, and you should make up your own mind about it, I just think it failed at doing what the first movie succeeded at. It needed a better more solid villain to focus the story on and balance out the tone of the film. It’s not that I think the first movie was just so good a sequel couldn’t live up to it, I was one of those contrarian fucks who said the first one wasn’t that amazing either. It was over-hyped and despite being a good movie, it wasn’t that mindblowing compared to something like Logan that it paved the way for. It’s just sad, because Logan was like a glimpse into a world of comic book movies we could have gotten.

Instead of this cookie cutter capes and one liners bullshit to sell happy meals, we could have Logan. And even I have my problems with Logan but that doesn’t change the fact it is what comic movies should strive to be but never will. What I’m saying is children ruin super hero movies haha.

So in summation, decent (totally wrong word) fun, silly slocky if unbalanced movie that’s worth a one time watch at least.

See you…