Deadpool 2 just opened this weekend, and fans and critics alike can’t get enough of the newest entrance into the franchise. While the film has so far been successful in both the eyes of the fans and at the box office, I actually had a lot of problems with the movie, and I would like to air out my grievances. With Deadpool being one of my favorite superheroes of all time, I was bound to enjoy the film, but I just feel that there was maybe too much happening in such a short period of time. However, this is just one man’s opinion, and I would like for you to listen to what I have to say and decide for yourself whether or not I’m right.
Hit and Miss Humor
My main problem with Deadpool 2 was that the point of the movie wasn’t the plot, the point of the movie was to make a joke with every single piece of dialogue. The whole plot of the film felt loose and sloppily thrown together to me, because everytime anyone did anything it was for the sake of a joke. Obviously we had the heart wrenching moments between Wade and Vanessa, and I truly enjoyed the sadness and romance we got to feel in those scenes, but literally every other moment of the movie was spent just trying to get a laugh. It got to the point where the humor wasn’t even clever, and it seemed more like a comedy routine that didn’t tell a linear story. A lot of these interactions could have easily been cut from the film, which leads to my next problem…
The “X-Force”
First of all, I would like to just point out that this could have been an X-Force movie. That’s the next movie being made in the Deadpool universe, but I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do for that film. In this movie Deadpool assembled the X-Force, took down the bad guys as a team, and even formed a little family for himself. So why was this even called Deadpool 2 instead of The X-Force? Not to mention the whole sequence where the first members of the X-Force fall to their deaths was just completely unnecessary. Nothing about it was funny, and it was just an excuse to not use those characters. Not to mention the fantastic actors they got to play these roles is just ridiculous, and a complete waste of talent for such a cringey sequence of events. All I can say about this part of the film is at least we got Domino and Peter out of the deal.
Too Many Cameos
A huge part of every Marvel film is the Stan Lee cameo, and that’s perfectly fine, it’s become a tradition at this point. However, it seems like every other actor in the world had a cameo in Deadpool 2 except for Stan Lee. The fact that they added Brad Pitt’s Vanisher in post-production just exemplifies my point that there’s no reason to have these major actors appear for a split second just to get killed and distract from the main plot of the film. It’s bad enough that the constant flow of humor buried the main story of the movie, but having Brad Pitt show up out of nowhere is just a little absurd. And this would be hilarious if it were just Brad Pitt, but Alan Tudyk and Matt Damon also had meaningless cameo appearances where they were killed in a matter of seconds, with Matt Damon made up to the point of being unrecognizable. This could be an extension of trying too hard to get a laugh out of the audience, but I feel like these could have been funny if they were just executed a little better.
The Juggernaut?
I haven’t seen a lot of backlash from the newest incarnation of Juggernaut so far, but I really didn’t like it. Having a completely CGI character might work for Colossus, but I honestly feel like a real actor should have been cast for Juggernaut, and it should have been executed along the same lines as Josh Brolin’s Thanos. Sure, he’s mostly CGI, but he still looks like Josh Brolin. Juggernaut didn’t even have a face, and he was played by Ryan Reynolds himself, because it really didn’t matter who provided the motion capture and voice of the character. Not to mention that he wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie from the beginning, it was supposed to be Black Tom Cassidy helping Russell get his revenge, and it seems as though they changed the villain to The Juggernaut at the last minute. The whole character just seemed so sloppily put together, and at this point I would have rathered Vinnie Jones in a horrible costume to a character that could have just not been in the movie.
Conclusion
Overall, I can’t lie and say I didn’t enjoy this movie. I did laugh a lot, I did go home satisfied, but I also think that the first film was better. Deadpool was the biggest R-rated superhero movie of all time, it was thoroughly hilarious, and the plot was exactly what we expected and wanted from a Deadpool movie. But most of all, it was intimate. It was a movie that Ryan Reynolds had tried to get made for years, and the studio budget was so low that they made fun of it in the movie. Deadpool 2 seems like a bit of a cash grab to me, because now the studio knows it has a cash cow, and it’s willing to pour as much money into this franchise as the writers want. However, the one aspect that carried over from the first movie the best is the Easter eggs. Deadpool’s grey X-Force suit, the Mr. Sinister references, the Wolverine and Hugh Jackman jokes, they were all exciting and hilarious, and this is something that the Deadpool films have truly mastered. The post-credit sequences could have been better, but I still didn’t think they were awful, and it was a good way to wrap up the film. All in all, I wouldn’t mind watching it again, but I do hope that the next installment in the franchise is a lot better.