Deadpool 2
(15) ★★★★

THE first Deadpool film was something of a surprise mega-hit. Yes, it fitted into the box office-assured superhero mould, but it doggedly sidestepped into something far more foul-mouthed and explicitly violent than its Marvel counterparts, allowing itself to go full-on meta by referencing the very fact that it’s part of the genre.

This obligatory but no less welcome sequel is certainly not going to convince anyone who wasn’t already on board Marvel’s most self-aware superhero train. But it gives fans more of what they want while upping the action stakes and, perhaps most surprisingly, hitting some unexpectedly poignant emotional beats, too.

This is, after all, as Deadpool’s typically knowing opening voiceover tells us, a film about family. How we get to that conclusion involves Deadpool – once again played with pitch perfect, charismatic comic timing by Ryan Reynolds – deciding to try out as part of team X-Men following a personal tragedy.

On his first assignment he meets Russell (Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s Julian Dennison), a teenage boy with the ability to shoot fire from his hands and who lives in an orphanage for mutant children. Finally having had enough of the mistreatment he receives at the home, Russell unleashes his ferocious ability on the world around him.

Before long our fourth-wall-breaking hero finds himself emotionally attached to the boy and has to defend him at all costs against a merciless, part-mechanical soldier named Cable (Josh Brolin), who has travelled back from the future to kill him. Played with a compelling ferocity by Brolin (his second Marvel villain role after Thanos), Cable immediately proves himself a real threat, armed with a ruthless determination and one heck of a powerful gun.

Under the direction of John Wick’s David Leitch, Deadpool 2 is a welcome case of a follow-up actually delivering in a way that builds on what came before to give us a more unwieldy but also more enjoyably bombastic, bigger-scale experience. It has everything fans loved from the last one but doubles down on them; the meta-joke rate is increased – make sure to stick around for the genius end credits – the bloody action is more ridiculously bloody and the cast is expanded to include some entertaining new faces.

The best of the newcomers is the scene-stealing Domino (Zazie Beetz, who shot to fame in US series Atlanta) whose power is the ingeniously simple fact that luck goes her way in any given situation. The chemistry between Reynolds and Beetz makes their playfully argumentative exchanges amid the action chaos a joy to behold.

The sarcastic, reference-laden humour dial is once again turned up to 11 in the script written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Reynolds himself. But it’s the action that really impresses this time around. Bringing on stunt co-ordinator turned director Leitch was a stroke of brilliance as he continues to show off the skills he deployed in John Wick and last year’s Atomic Blonde for bone-crunching, wince-inducing action that’s suited to Deadpool’s world of comically violent abandon.

Does it sometimes threaten to buckle under its own meta weight? Perhaps. But it really comes down to how far you’re willing to go along with it. It’s a film that, more than ever, is upfront about its swaggering personality, looking too cool for school as it sarcastically swears and fights its way to ridiculous new heights while still retaining the charm that made the whole concept a hit in the first place. It’s just bloody fun time at the movies.