Time to wrap up Marvel catchup month once again, by looking at another one of Fox's successful movies with mutants, Deadpool 2. I'll be reviewing the Super Duper cut of the movie, but I also want to at least address Once Upon a Deadpool, a toned down cut of the movie that was released... even though I haven't seen it myself. I've seen the Super Duper Cut, it's why that's the one I'm officially reviewing, but you'll see why I want to address it later.
Starting off with the plot and... I don't know what the fuck I just watched. To boil it down to its basics, Deadpool is trying to protect a kid from Cable, due to him feeling sorry for not being able to protect his girlfriend after a bunch of goons break into their house to try and kill him. The reason Cable is trying to kill him? Because in the future this kid becomes a serial killer, burning his victims alive with his fire powers after being subjected to torture at a mutant rehabilitation clinic. Sounds very dark right? All tension is killed by all the jokes in the movie. Jokes which, I'll admit didn't really work most of the time. Some went on too long, and others just weren't funny. A lot of that comes from tastes in comedy though, I prefer more reactive comedy rather than reference comedy. Seeing characters work off each other is the kind of comedy I enjoy, and while there is a lot of that in this movie, a lot of the reactions don't always work. One example I can think of is when Deadpool is trying to regrow his legs, and you have the blind woman from the first movie, the bartender, the cab driver, new character Domino, and Cable all saying how disgusting it is. Yeah, some of the reactions are funny, but it's also an example of the joke going on for far longer than it really should. There are some that got a laugh out of me, like all the times that people made fun of Deadpool for being an X-men trainee, along with Beast quietly closing the door to not let Deadpool know that Fox did have the budget for more X-Men this time, but jokes like Deadpool remarking on how Cable could fit into the DC universe just feels cliche.
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| Well... that's a record at least... |
A cliche is probably the best way to describe the presentation of the movie as well. It's hard to call this movie a parody of superhero movies when it falls into the same traps as them. I mean, it's fun to see Deadpool want to kill himself a lot, but in terms of the bigger picture, it is just another Superhero movie. It's all well and good to mock the fact that there's a CGI focused battle about to start, but the joke means nothing if that's all you're going to do, especially when Juggernaught is the enemy the hero is fighting because we've already seen him be made a fool. In fact, truth be told, though he looks better here, I find the version of Juggernaut used in X-Men 3 to be more interesting because, at least in that movie, we actually see his power. Here? You could swap him out for any big, muscly villain and it would still be the same. On the subject of the effects, they're kinda... eh? It has its moments, things like the opening battles, Cable's robotic arm, and the way the world works for Domino all look good, but Colossus still looks bad, his fight with Juggernaught looks worse, the blood and gore are ok. People have been making realistic blood for movies for years so it's not really an achievement to say it looks good. The soundtrack for the movie is just as chaotic as the story itself. One moment could have a fight with dubstep playing in the background... for some reason... then the next it could be Tomorrow while someone is taking a bullet in slow-mo. It's things like these that scream "this movie didn't have a clear direction", which is honestly it's biggest fault.
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| Ok that's just being a dick |
Even bigger then Once Upon a Deadpool, a recut of Deadpool 2 that a lot of people hate because it takes the edge away from Deadpool, with many thinking that it proves that Deadpool needs to be a mature rated film. I... disagree, though I agree with why people think that way. It's clear that after watching this movie that it wasn't intended for anything lower than the rating it got, so editing it to force it into a lower rating was never going to work. The notion of Deadpool not being able to work with a lower rating though? That I disagree with. So come with me now while I ignore this excuse of a review to talk about ways that Deadpool could work as a normal MCU movie, because as Once Upon a Deadpool shows (I have seen the new scenes they added in), it was to see if it would work as a Disney movie.
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| Oh hi Thanos |
Allow me to set the stage. Imagine this is Deadpool 3, with Deadpool teaming up with Spider-Man because everyone knows they're going to at least try that. There's an exposition dump happening to explain why the big bad needs to be stopped, and Deadpool goes into say something vulgar. Before he can say more than the first syllable though, a truck races past with the horn going off, drowning out what Deadpool said. He shrugs it off at first, but the same thing happens multiple times throughout the film, with each one from the same truck, and each one making him more and more annoyed. Jump ahead to the Post Credits scene, where during the set up for the next movie, Deadpool finally snaps and walks away from the scene to chase down that truck driver. Once he catches up to the truck, he opens the door to see that it's someone with authority over the movie, for this example, I'll use Kevin Feige, who answers why it kept happening by saying "I don't make the rules, I just follow them", or something like that. You'd be "censoring" Deadpool while making it work as a meta-joke, and using the character's forth wall breaks to your advantage. In terms of the blood and gore, you can give Deadpool a throwaway line like "Huh... normally this is a lot messier... Did someone forget to pay the effects guys again?" However, I'll admit I say that with no experience on the once Netflix shows such as The Punisher. Either way, while I agree that re-editing a movie that was graphic for the sake of a lower rating was a bad call, I do think you can have some fun with the character in that rating. You just have to be creative with it. Can't hurt to try.
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| "We were never here" |
As for Deadpool 2, overall I thought it was mediocre, but that might be because I find the better superhero parody movie to be Lego Batman. It's crude, it's tasteless, it's better then Bayformers because it just accepts it's stupidity and runs with it, but it's not a movie I'll see again. I'll give credit to the post-credits scenes, they are funny at least, and I still maintain that the X-Men Origins Jimmy edit should be the new ending in all versions of that film for now on, but there isn't much aside from that. Interested to see how well Deadpool will handle when he's with others though, and at least there's always Detective Pikachu in two weeks... I never thought I'd ever need to say that... See you Wednesday for the start of MAYvel proper I guess.
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