Dead­pool 2

Per­haps there’s some­thing refresh­ing about the way in which the lat­est instal­ment in the bur­geon­ing Dead­pool fran­chise doesn’t even put up a half-heart­ed attempt to pre­tend it’s dif­fer­ent from its pre­de­ces­sor. Five min­utes or so into the film, the offi­cial Dead­pool anthem, DMX’s ​‘X Gon’ Give It To Ya’, starts to play, and with it comes the sug­ges­tion – or per­haps admis­sion – that what we’re about to wit­ness is more of the same juve­nile schtick which made its 2016 ori­gin sto­ry a box office smash.

A hyper­vi­o­lent mon­tage set to Dol­ly Parton’s ​‘9 to 5’ opens pro­ceed­ings in exact­ly the same way Juice Newton’s ​‘Angel of the Morn­ing’ kicked off Dead­pool OG, which implies there’s been zero pro­gres­sion between the start of that film and this one. Busi­ness as usu­al for the merc with a mouth – until a job goes bad and he’s swept up in a crazy scheme involv­ing a 13-year-old boy called Rus­sell (played by Hunt for the Wilder­peo­ple​‘s end­less­ly charm­ing Julian Den­ni­son) and a grumpy super sol­dier from the future by the name of Cable (Josh Brolin, in his sec­ond Mar­vel bad­die out­ing of 2018).

But Dead­pool isn’t alone – he’s joined by return­ing X‑Men heroes Nega­son­ic Teenage War­head and Colos­sus, and a host of new pals, includ­ing the much-hyped Domi­no, played by the lumi­nous Zazie Beetz, who man­ages to effort­less­ly become the film’s high­light. Not that there’s much com­pe­ti­tion for that title.

For a film which makes a big deal out of being zany and unpre­dictable, everything’s very much paint-by-num­bers – even the gross-out SFX and bloody fight sequences. Like the kid at school who’s des­per­ate for atten­tion, the motor­mouthed Dead­pool riffs away on the likes of insti­tu­tion­alised child abuse, Bat­man v Super­man (no tar­get is too easy!) and remains curi­ous­ly obsessed with anal sex in the same way he was in the first movie. Giv­en that Dead­pool is a canon­i­cal­ly pan­sex­u­al char­ac­ter in the com­ic books from which he orig­i­nat­ed, this might make sense, if it weren’t for the fact that in this cin­e­mat­ic ren­der­ing, he’s so aggres­sive­ly set up as a macho, #NoHo­mo hero.

In the same way that Dead­pool 2 retreads the sup­pos­ed­ly sub­ver­sive ground of its pre­de­ces­sor, it suf­fers from the same key prob­lem: it’s hard to invest in any sort of emo­tion­al beats in the sto­ry when the film itself is a mock­ery of the very notion of emo­tions full stop. It mocks its super­hero sta­ble­mates, chiefly James Mangold’s Logan (even using a musi­cal cue from the film), but in an attempt to have its cake and eat it, still expects audi­ences to care about the feel­ings and moti­va­tions of its characters.

Where Logan earned this emo­tion­al res­o­nance through rev­er­ence of its char­ac­ters and a cer­tain earnest­ness, Dead­pool 2 attempts nihilism with heart and trips over itself in attempts to be edgy. But this is 2018 – we live in the age of incels and flat-earth­ers, of memes about memes and polit­i­cal scan­dal as polit­i­cal norm. A film like Dead­pool 2 has no cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy any­more. Even the pres­ence of TJ Miller – accused of sex­u­al assault and con­firmed bomb hoax arse­hole – makes com­plete sense in a film as trag­i­cal­ly banal as this. It mocks the likes of Logan and Avengers, but yearns to be talked about in the same sen­tence with­out putting in the hard graft which has earned those films more praise.

Which brings us to the big ques­tion: why do we watch movies? To be moved? To be enter­tained? To find some­thing out about our­selves that we didn’t know before we entered the cin­e­ma? Cer­tain­ly there’s noth­ing mov­ing about watch­ing Ryan Reynolds ham it up under his red mask, nor much enter­tain­ing about Dead­pool 2 unless you’re a sex-obsessed teenage boy or some­one who still finds gay jokes fun­ny. All that Dead­pool 2 teach­es us is that stu­dios will cash in on any­thing they can, and that cin­e­mat­ic junk food – cheap and dis­pos­able, aimed at those look­ing for a sug­ar high and ease of con­sump­tion – lives on.