Deadpool 2 brings back most of the cast from the surprise hit movie: Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Morena Baccarin (his girlfriend, Vanessa), Leslie Uggams (Blind Al), Karan Soni (Dopinder the cab driver) and T.J. Miller, whose mutant power is the superhuman ability to sabotage his own career.
As the movie starts, Deadpool and Vanessa decide to start a family. Unfortunately, this goal hits a minor setback. Despondent, Deadpool ends up becoming an X-Men Trainee (TM) under Colossus and tries to rehabilitate an angry preteen named “Firefist” with the mutant power of flame generation (and possibly insulin resistance). However, once they’re stuck together in Mutant Penitentiary, Deadpool has to save the kid from a gun-toting cyborg named Cable, played by Josh Brolin. (Yes, Deadpool calls him Thanos at one point.) And once it’s revealed that Cable came from the future to change his own past, it raises the matter of how a decision to treat others can have effects on the whole universe. This is important, because it comes up at the end of the movie.
One thing I like about the Deadpool series is that it goes against the tendency in how most superheroes are adapted to the screen. Comicbook characters are literally cartoons. Their appearance, including a mask, is central to their identity, which is why Bruce Wayne doesn’t just fight crime in his civvies. But when studios are making a comicbook movie with a big star like Robert Downey Jr., they want to show Iron Man with his mask off as much as possible, because otherwise they think its a waste of star power to show a costume when pretty much anybody could be in it. But the producers of Deadpool movies (including Ryan Reynolds) get Deadpool. They put little facial expressions on his mask and show him in costume as much as possible because that’s how the comicbook looks. Besides which, Deadpool with his mask off looks kind of like a statue that someone sculpted out of dried cow shit and painted with a coat of vomit. Or like an abortion that crawled out of the biowaste bin, then escaped the facility, then grew up. Look, you get the idea.
In any case, Deadpool 2 not only has the violence and profanity we’ve come to expect, but it also holds together as a dramatic story (eventually) and it happens to have the most badass action-hero soundtrack EVER.