Deadpool 2

There are a fair number of Wolverine jokes in Deadpool 2, which is a fair target - since the first Deadpool, Logan got a fair amount of good reviews for transcending its genre and being Very Serious, and I suspect that the folks making the movie want to have a little fun with how Twentieth Century Fox clearly sees Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool as the new center of their X-Men franchise the way Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was, something I mentioned last year when writing up Logan.

Got lucky seeing this one on the big screen at the Somerville - I figured the whole day's worth of shows would be on screen #5 or something because there was a live show in the evening, but the 1pm show, at least, got screen #1, and will probably be camped out there until it's 2001 time.

(Sorry there's not more to say here; I really thought I hadn't written that Wolverine/Deadpool thing before!)

Deadpool 2

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2018 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, DCP)

It's tough to do Deadpool twice; the first was a well-needed go at taking the piss out of Marvel's ubiquity and how seriously some fans take corporate shared universes, but the second can't help but build up its own continuity even as it spends the credits shredding the very idea. Plus, Marvel has done Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming in the last year, closing a little ground, which means Deadpool 2 has to go farther to try and get the same results - although, isn't that the case with most sequels?

There's enough continuity built up that it actually takes a while to get to the meat of the movie, where mutant assassin Wade "Deadpool" Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) screws up a mission with X-Men Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and winds up tossed in mutant prison "the icebox" with 14-year-old "Firefist" (Julian Dennison). That's bad. Worse is that the kid apparently grows up to be a supervillain who kills the family of time-traveling soldier Nathan "Cable" Summers (Josh Brolin) a few decades from now, requiring Wade to put together an X-Force team to rescue the kid - Bedlam (Terry Crews), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård), Vanisher (invisible), Domino (Zazie Beetz), and powerless Peter (Rob Delaney).

There's a joke about ten minutes into the movie - the stinger to another self-parodying title sequence - that's the film in a nutshell, in that it plays on how familiar certain bits are for a laugh but is also building the story around them without actually subverting them. It's a narrow line to walk but arguably a necessary one to make a movie that is both a spoof of superhero universes and one that fits inside of one. The whole thing would fall apart as a contradictory mess if everybody involved weren't very good at both the winking at the audience and doing things for real.

Full review on EFC