BEFORE: T.J. Miller carries over again from "Ready Player One". His four appearances this week will qualify him for my end-of-year countdown (and there will be 5 if I can work in "Office Christmas Party" in December...) but that's by no means a top-level achievement - not in a year when Basil Rathbone already has 14 "Sherlock Holmes" appearances and is likely to come out on top, tied with Nigel Bruce of course. Nicole Kidman's been in four films in 2018, but with 7 more on my list she could end up with 11. Same goes for Samuel L. Jackson, who's appeared in 6 films so far, but could also have 11 appearances before year's end. James McAvoy's another one to watch, with 6 appearances already in 2018, but I think he may only end up with 8 total. This is why I've got to play out the whole year before counting everything up - Christopher Lee could come on strong in October and be a late contender, or someone like Paul McCartney or Keith Richards could appear in a bunch of rock documentaries in July/August.
FOLLOW-UP TO "Deadpool" (Movie #2,443)
THE PLOT: Foul-mouthed mercenary Wade Wilson brings together a team of fellow mutant rogues to protect a young boy with mutant abilities from the brutal time-traveling cyborg, Cable.
AFTER: This may have been placed here on my list due to the presence of T.J. Miller (and the fact that I couldn't get it to line up with another Ryan Reynolds movie, like "Life" or "The Hitman's Bodyguard") but there are so many cameos in this film that another actor ended up carrying over from last night's film, too. These cameos (and shout-outs to other Marvel Comics movies) are both fun and unexpected, so if you would like to be surprised, then just don't read the cast list below. I thought about redacting them, but I'm going to need to total this all up at the end of the year, so I have to list them.
When this film starts, Deadpool is in a funk, a real bad one. He's suicidal in fact, only his super-powers dictate that he can't die, so there's a certain level of irony in an essentially immortal character being suicidal. He can blow himself to bits, and apparently as long as someone arranges the pieces close together, his body will knit everything back together. Or if you cut off his arm, or a leg, or slice his torso in half, eventually tiny limbs will grow back and after a few hours, he'll be whole again. In the comic books, they even had a villain character that was assembled from all the pieces of Deadpool that had been lopped off over the years, I don't know where that character got its head, or if one just kind of grew there once 80% of his spare body parts were assembled. Hey, that's a great plot idea for "Deadpool 3", Wade faces off against his amputated limbs counterpart.
Now, at first we're led to believe that Deadpool's in a funk because Wolverine is dead, and he never got to appear in a movie with him. Which doesn't make literal sense in this timeline, because the film "Logan" was set far in the future, and so those events depicted there wouldn't have happened yet from Deadpool's point of view. (Maybe he's talking about Wolverine being dead in the comics, which he was, up until a few months ago. Remember, "comic book dead" doesn't last very long.) But this movie doesn't seem to care much for proper treatment of the timeline, or sticking too close to any one continuity, it just wants to have fun with its characters. And to be "Nitpick Proof" to sticklers like me.
Now, that being said, once you introduce a time-traveling character like Cable, you still end up opening up a huge can of worms where history is involved. Cable travels back in time because a young mutant grows up to become an activist/terrorist and kill his family, so he figures if he travels back in time, and kills the terrorist when he's a kid, he can save those lives. But as we should all know by now, if someone travels back in time to prevent something, and they do manage to change the timeline to prevent that thing, then they create a timeline in which that thing didn't happen, and then the version of them that doesn't encounter the tragic event has no need to travel back to prevent the incident (since it now didn't happen) so they don't. And then, logically, the bad thing happens anyway, because now they didn't travel back to prevent it. The best you can hope for is a time-loop, or the creation of an alternate reality where that thing didn't happen, but a time traveler cannot change a tragic thing like this.
This movie, however, just doesn't care. And in some ways that's a good thing, but you know it's going to keep bugging me. At the end Deadpool "borrows" the time-travel device and goes on a spree, simultaneously cleaning up the timelines while also probably screwing them up worse at the same time. That version of Deadpool that was seen in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was by all accounts a complete mistake, and perhaps deserves to be ignored or forgotten, but Deadpool traveling back to kill himself is not the answer - a) because not even Deadpool can kill Deadpool and b) even if he could, killing yourself in the past is another bad time-travel idea, because then you don't have a future. (Same time-loop problem, if the older you kills the younger you, then there IS no older you because the younger you didn't grow up, so now the older you can't kill the younger you, and therefore the whole thing can't happen.) Funny joke, but bad use of time-travel.
(The other cameos set in the X-Mansion are also impossible, but for different reasons. I withhold my complaining here because again, it's a funny bit.)
Deadpool brings back all of the characters he interacted with in the first film, both super-powered and non-super-powered, and adds a few more for good measure. Joining Colossus (and they STILL can't get the CGI on him quite right, his lips just don't sync up with his voice often enough...) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (still probably the worst name for a superhero ever, in movies or comics, it doesn't mean a damn thing, since there's no such word as "negasonic") are new characters Domino, Shatterstar, Bedlam, Zeitgeist and Vanisher. Not all of these are meant to be taken seriously either, they're either perceived minor characters from the comics, or they're soon turned into visual jokes or killed off very quickly, or both. Whatever characters remain on this "X-Force" team in the end get the honor of being in the next movie, I suppose.
There's plenty of action here and the good guys win and the bad guys lose, if that's possible when you have characters like Deadpool who ride that fine line in-between - but it's too much of an overused trope to have two characters fight when they meet for the first time, then team up to defeat the evil power. Haven't we seen this before a thousand times in the comics, and then again in movies like "Batman v. Superman"? Why not try something different for once, or are we just going to be satisfied with the same old thing, eventually leading to diminishing returns?
NITPICK POINT - So, just down the road from Xavier's School for Gifted Children (aka the X-Mansion) is the Essex Mutant Re-education Center, which is some form of mutant containment facility (prison and torture center)? How do the X-Men not know about this place, and why haven't they worked to shut this place down? OK, I get that this place negates the powers of mutants, so maybe they can't be detected - but still, isn't this the kind of thing that the X-Men should be constantly looking for, with their fingers on the pulse of mutant-related issues like enforcement and containment? Plus, with "Essex" in the name, isn't that a sign that the place is a front, and is run by Mr. Sinister (aka Nathaniel Essex)? This really needs to tie in with the post-credits scene from "X-Men: Apocalypse" and therefore serve as a lead-in to "Dark Phoenix", and if this happens, then all is forgiven.
Also starring Ryan Reynolds (last seen in "Life"), Josh Brolin (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), Morena Baccarin (last seen in "Deadpool"), Brianna Hildebrand (ditto), Leslie Uggams (ditto), Zazie Beetz, Julian Dennison, Jack Kesy, Karan Soni (last seen in "Ghostbusters"), Terry Crews (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Lewis Tan, Rob Delaney, Eddie Marsan (last seen in "God's Pocket"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Anna Karenina"), Shioli Kutsuna, Hayley Sales, Islie Hirvonen, Nikolai Witschl, Thayr Harris, the voice of Stefan Kapicic, and cameos from Matt Damon (last seen in "Downsizing"), Alan Tudyk (last seen in "Trumbo"), Brad Pitt (last seen in "Allied"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Mad Max: Fury Road"), James McAvoy (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Evan Peters (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Alexandra Shipp (ditto), Tye Sheridan (also carrying over from "Ready Player One"), Kodi Smit-McPhee (last seen in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes"), and archive footage (it counts...) of Hugh Jackman (last seen in "The Greatest Showman").
RATING: 7 out of 10 headshot photos
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