The Novelty Factor
The one area where Deadpool 2 suffers is in the novelty factor. When the first film came out, it was something new and fresh – changing the landscape of superhero movies. This time around, you knew what to expect going into it.
It’s still funny and entertaining, sure, but the scenes where the character breaks the fourth wall and the opening montage, for example, aren’t quite as powerful as before. You sort of expected them to happen; instead of gasping at the fact that they did.
This is no fault of the filmmakers, though. Once something has been done, it’s over. It’ll never have the new feeling of before. In fact, if you try too hard, it might blow up in your face.
Undoubtedly, the cast and crew realized this and doubled down on what they could influence. As Reynolds told The New York Times:
“When there’s built-in expectation, your brain always processes that as danger.”
The smartest thing that Deadpool 2 did was to continue where the first film left off. It stuck to what it knows best, rather than try to reinvent the wheel and veer off course.
The Craziness
Deadpool was raunchy and unpredictable, pulling out jokes that no one would’ve dreamed a major studio would allow in a million years. After all, we expect these studio execs to be sticks in the mud who listen to Bryan Adams on the weekend and think Adam Sandler is the second coming of George Carlin.
Incredibly, Deadpool 2 ups the ante and gets even more insane than before. From Marvel Studios, to the DC Universe, to the US president’s son-in-law, no one is safe from this movie’s joke factory. In fact, it even ventured deep into South Park territory, where there’s bound to be at least one lawsuit and protest in this franchise’s future.
As long as Reese, Wernick, and Reynolds remain as the driving forces of the creative team, then, we have nothing to worry about in terms of the Merc’s next few appearances. Despite having less time to write this film than the first one, the team knocked it out of the park once again.
In a recent interview with Collider, Reynolds explained the process as follows:
“We had less time to obviously write this one. The other one we had, we luxuriated in eight long years of purgatory. So, this time we were really kind of cramming. We were basically like the three little bears with their laptops sitting at my house, working on Deadpool 2 as soon as we could right after Deadpool.”