Review: Deadpool 2

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

Sure, "Deadpool 2" has its share of laughs and snarky winks to the audience and, yes, it's potty mouthed and much gorier than your average comic book movie. On the other hand, despite some amusing moments and genuinely earned chuckles, the picture isn't as transgressive at its makers appear to think that it is.

In the film, Ryan Reynolds returns as Wade Wilson - aka Deadpool - the anti-superhero whose face is disfigured from a bad burn and whose body can regenerate, thereby making him nearly impossible to kill. This installment opens with a particularly dark moment, similar to the finale of the recent "Avengers" movie, that casts a pall over the otherwise wisecracking tone of the picture.

After Wade loses a loved one, he is left hopeless - that is, until he is befriended by a young mutant named Firefist (Julian Dennison), whose rebellious nature strikes a chord with Deadpool. The duo end up being thrown into a maximum security prison, but are busted out by a cyborg-looking fellow from the future named Cable (Josh Brolin, in his second comic book movie in the past few weeks), who has traveled back in time to assassinate Firefist for reasons that only later become clear.

Deadpool travels to the X-Men mansion, where he jokingly makes note of the fact that only the B-list mutants are there to greet him. There's a later sequence during which he and his pal Weasel (T.J. Miller) round up a group of individuals for a new team whose powers are, well, questionable at best. There's also a fairly funny running joke regarding one of the new team members named Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose superpower is good luck.

"Deadpool 2," as I'd mentioned before, is full of wink-and-nod jokes - such as references to the D.C. universe and wisecracks about this film's own screenplay - and some are funny, while others give the vibe of trying a little too hard. I had mixed feelings about the first "Deadpool" film. This one is slightly better, but it's still just an average superhero movie, albeit one filled with F-bombs, extremely gory fight sequences and a hero who occasionally does some shady business.

But all in all, "Deadpool 2" - which was directed by David Leitch, whose previous films "Atomic Blonde" and "John Wick" were better action movies with incredible stunts - gets the job done for this type of picture. It's foul mouthed and funnier than your average Marvel movie, but it also follows the same cliches of the genre, although it frequently attempts to subvert them. There's a scene near the end that is more emotionally resonant than you might expect for this series, but this is a film that otherwise doesn't take itself very seriously. For the sake of enjoying it, you might consider doing the same.