Perhaps the biggest reason why is that it’s directed by someone whose action movie bona fides are basically undeniable. It’s to Leitch’s credit that, as manic and crazy as the scene gets, he keeps it cleanly designed and paced, unlike too many superhero movie sequences.ĭeadpool 2 is, even for those viewers (including this one) who don’t much like it, an improvement over its predecessor. Juggernaut is treated as a truly unknown quantity: The sequence effectively ends when Deadpool tries to make peace with the big guy, who promptly rips him in half.
(A climactic sequence here relies too much on CGI, which isn’t aided by Deadpool looking at the camera to point out that the fight scene is full of CGI effects.) As is the case with many of the fights, there’s an escalation - as Deadpool acknowledges earlier in the film, it’s foreshadowed that the teenage mutant will make friends with a mystery character inside a maximum-security prison cell - when the X-Men character Juggernaut bursts out of the moving prison to protect the kid and fend off any presumed attackers. What’s more, there’s a coherency to the action choreography of the sequence that’s absent from the original Deadpool. But when he faces off with Cable in hand-to-hand combat, there’s a sense that he’s met his match physically. Deadpool’s superpowers include the inability to die - as he proves to himself early in the film as he tries and fails to commit suicide by blowing up his own apartment. (Something about the X-Force gag preceding it feels a little like a bloodier take on a similar scene in the cult comedy Mystery Men, in which the motley lead characters inadvertently murder a Superman-like good guy.) Cable, somewhat like the other Marvel antagonist that Josh Brolin has played, is a counterbalance to the wackiness and his presence in the action scene suggests that there’s more going on than just Deadpool murdering mostly faceless bad guys. Once Deadpool and Domino begin their rescue on the transport, the scene comes to life. (One of the quickly killed mutants is played by the biggest cameo actor: Deadpool recruits a mutant called the Vanisher, who is invisible until he lands on a telephone wire and is electrocuted just as we see that he’s none other than Brad Pitt.) Only one of the X-Force mutants survives: Domino (Zazie Beetz), whose superpower is luck, which gets her close enough to help break into the prison transport. The X-Force idea first seems like a dark joke: though Deadpool is able to recruit some mutants (including characters played by Terry Crews and Bill Skarsgard), they almost all die in outrageously bloody fashion upon parachuting from a helicopter on a dangerously windy day. The highlight of the film comes at roughly its midpoint, as Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) tries to wrangle together a group of mutants called X-Force to rescue a teenage mutant from a prison transport before a time-traveling character named Cable (Josh Brolin) can get to and kill the teenager. He and his John Wick co-director, Chad Stahelski, were second unit directors on films like The Wolverine and Captain America: Civil War, which includes the battle in an abandoned airport, one of the handful of great Marvel action set pieces - and it shows in Deadpool 2. Leitch, however, has experience in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its related franchises. More to the point, the original Deadpool had a fairly low budget - $58 million - for a superhero movie, which may have contributed to that film having a less pleasing visual aesthetic or kinetic action sequences.
Though the film has a series of action sequences, so many other Marvel movies feel beholden to the special effects in any given set piece. There’s only so much that Leitch can do here - a lot of what makes Deadpool 2 stand out (for good or ill) is in the joke-heavy script. Though Miller was a major part of shepherding the character of Deadpool to the big screen, Leitch’s presence in Deadpool 2 is one of its brightest spots. And considering that one of the bigger stories surrounding the sequel’s production involved the change in directors from Tim Miller to David Leitch, the credits at least acknowledge Leitch’s past work on the thrilling 2014 action film John Wick and its harrowing dog death.
Just as Deadpool had a series of opening credits that broke the fourth wall, making inside-baseball references to how big movies are assembled (and crediting the writers as “The Real Heroes Here”), Deadpool 2 does the same thing.