The Forgotten DEADPOOL 2 Write-Up

Whoa.

Been even longer than the usual "man, it's been awhile" postings I usually do.

Wouldn't have been quite as long if I'd remembered to post this thing back when I initially wrote it.

It's a small thing, but at least it's actually still playing, at least in my little rinky-dink one-theater town. I guess people are still going to see it.

Anyways, here goes...

DEADPOOL 2 (2018)

Directed by David Leitch

Screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Ryan Reynolds

Starring Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Jack Kesy

 

Deadpool is back, and even more Deadpoolier, which is great for people who like that sort of thing. Since I enjoyed the first one, I was happy to plunk down and watch this one.

To really talk about how I feel about it, tho, I'm going to have to throw in some pretty

BIG

SPOILERS

so I'll hide them behind a cut and some pretty pictures...

Remember...spoiler space...

Okay....here we go.

First, a small digression. 

There's a term fairly well-known amongst comic fans (or at least it was when I still had money and space to buy comics regularly) called 'fridging.' It came about when a comic hero found his girlfriend dead, stuffed into a refrigerator. It led comic fan and later comic writer Gail Simone (who, by the way, wrote Deadpool for a bit) to look at how female characters were treated in comics, specifically with the way they were so often abused/killed for little reason other than to give the male hero someone to avenge. It's a long list.

You can read up on it here and check out the original website it spawned here.

I bring it up because, well, remember Deadpool's girlfriend Vanessa from the first film? Yeah, they kill her off in the first minutes of the film so Deadpool can go off and feel bad and then find a new 'family' (while killing a ton of people and making a ton of jokes along the way). And "They fridged her" was the first thing that went thru my mind. It colored the rest of the movie for me. I wasn't angry, just disappointed. In this day and age, in particular, it seemed like an especially lazy way to get Deadpool motivated, especially when he ended up coming to the aid of abused kid (Julian Dennison as Firefist). Sure, DP isn't exactly a "hero" in the traditional sense, no matter how much Colossus (voiced again by Stefan Kapicic) would like him to be, but still...seems like he'd help out a kid even without a dead girlfriend weighing on his mind.

The rest of the movie was fine. Josh Brolin did a great turn as Cable, Zazie Beetz was fun as Domino (go read Gail Simone's current Domino comic - it's good!), and Brianna Hildebrand is always welcome. She didn't get as much screentime as I would've liked but she did get a cute girlfriend in the person of Shioli Kutsuna as Yukio, so that's cool.

So, yeah...it was a good movie, staying true to the over-the-top violence and humor that made the first one so fun but starting it off the way the did just sour the whole thing for me. Call me a snowflake SJW if you like. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Sure, the end-credits tag kinda made up for it, so maybe I'll give it another shot when it hits video. I dunno....