shelidonJune 16, 2018Leave a Comment

Ok, I’ve had to think about this long and hard (and beware when you use these kind of expressions, giving that I’m talking about Deadpool). I also watched the first movie again, because Science! and I finally reached a decision: I loved the first one, but I enjoyed this sequel even more. Spoilers ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And don’t get me wrong but I enjoyed pretty much everything.

Characters were written in a fantastic way and you might be deceived by the fact that this is a fun, parodist superhero movie but just take some time to think about what they did here.

• Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) had to die or to turn into Copycat, in order to have a decent space in the movie: they already used the damsel-in-distress-stabbing-the-bad-guy scheme in the first movie and they couldn’t repeat it. I’m kind of glad they chose this road, because the girlfriend turning supersomething would have been too obvious. So yeah, she had to die. Sorry.
• Cable (the amazing Josh Brolin) had to be the villain to show how cool he is, a trick we’ve already seen in the first Avengers if you remember what they did with Hawkeye. And everything about him was fine tuned, in my opinion. He’s badass but also snarky enough to team up with Deadpool, he’s perfectly believable when he turns to our heroes for help (something you don’t see everyday in a movie, right?), he’s a highly tragic figure and the memento of his tragedy is… well, come on, he’s traveling with a teddy bear hanging from his backpack. And yet, everything makes sense, everything comes together.
• Domino (Zazie Beetz) is simply fantastic. I loved the aesthetics of the character: in the comics she’s clown-like white with a black patch on her eye and here she’s a perfectly believable dark-skinned girl with a vitiligo patch on her eye. And her power of being lucky is perfectly built through the grotesque scene where all X-force gets decimated by wind and bad planning.
• The X-Force squad is a wonderful cameo for all of us comics readers: Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), Zeitgeist (Bill Skarsgård), Bedlam (Terry Crews) were all members of the squad and seeing them dead in that stupid way is both perfectly in line with the movie and useful to build up Domino by contrast. Plus everyone wanted Shatterstar dead. And the Vanisher… well, yes, it was him. He also was a supervillain, enemy of the X-Force. Someone did their homework. I also loved the fact that Deadpool goes back to save… Peter, the civilian. It’s a nice connection with what we say about Wade in the first movie.
• Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) is again a deus-ex-machina and it’s fine this way: with her girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) they bring out both sides of Deadpool at the same time. It’s a fantastic trick. According to Wikipedia, they are the first gay couple in a superhero movie. Like for real?
• Colossus has a nice space and you’ve got to love that, even when he thinks he’s giving in to the dark side, his idea of fighting dirty is using knuckles. You’re made of iron, dude. It won’t make any difference.
• We’re also glad that Blind Al (once and always beautiful Leslie Uggams) and Dopinder (Karan Soni) are back. Apparently even Deadpool needs a comic relief and writers don’t seem to want to leave anybody behind.
• A nice not obvious work was done with the Juggernaut: while you expect him to behave like a villain, he’s actually teaming up with the kid for real. The only thing that went too far for me was the high tension cable but… well, I can live with that.
• Last but not least, I hate kids in movies but Julian Dennison‘s Firefist is decent enough. The whole story has a strong flavor of the Messiah Complex story arc, which I didn’t enjoy much if you remember, where Bishop traveled back from the future to kill Hope Summers. And how you love that the daughter of Cable in the movie is named Hope? Well played, sirs, well played indeed.

Music also deserves a mention. The soundtrack of the first movie was great, both the original by Junkie XL and the choice of original songs: Calendar Girl and Careless Whisper to prove it was a love story, and above all Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning for the opening scene. That opening sequence was really tough to surpass, but I dare to say the succeeded. The opening titles in James Bond style are accompanied by the original Ashes, performed by Celine Dion, and watch the official video below, if you haven’t already.

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Other songs include Papa, Can You Hear Me? (oh, shit, Frozen really did rip this off!), The Piña Colada Song and of course Cable comes out wondering what fucking year is it if people are listening to that, Thunderstruck and I can’t help but thinking that it’s an homage to the Ironman movies soundtrack, a song from the Old Man Logan movie (Don’t Be What They Made You) that plays well with all the other 4th wall breaking references, the most appropriate If I Could Turn Back Time by Cher. And it keeps on going: if you keep digging in the soundtrack, you’ll find loads and loads of things you didn’t notice, things you missed, things that are a reference to other things that are a reference to other things. And they’re pretty confident you didn’t notice lyrics of the Russian chorus accompanying the battle between Colossus and the Juggernaut, so they put a clean version in the end credits.

And it doesn’t seem to be legit to talk about a Marvel movie without mentioning the post-ending scenes. Luckily enough I sharpened the butter knife, right?