It’s a little embarrassing to keep going to the cinema only for superhero films but after their brilliant marketing campaign there was no way I would be missing out on Deadpool 2. I was initially skeptical of decisions such as making Domino a black woman but as it turned out this film is clearly made by people who understood what the 1990s comics scene was like and I ended up like this more than Infinity War.

Wade Wilson’s girlfriend Vanessa is killed by one of the targets that he failed to kill earlier, sending him into a depression. After he attempts to commit suicide only to be foiled by his regenerative powers, Colossus retrieves him and tries to make him one of the X-Men. Their first outing is to resolve a confrontation at an orphanage involving a young mutant named Rusty. When Deadpool realizes that Rusty had been abused, he killed a member of the staff and both Rusty and himself are taken to a prison for mutants. Meanwhile Cable travels from the future after his family has been killed and attacks the same prison with Rusty being his target. He is convinced that Rusty will become a supervillain in the future and wants to make sure that future never happens. The fight ends with Deadpool escaping from the prison and he decides to form a team of his own to rescue Rusty and stop Cable.

I had my doubts about this early on when the first thing of consequence it does is fridge the love interest from the first film and felt that the endless string of pop culture references was too forced. The film wants the audience to both take Deadpool’s grief seriously and to mock the tragedy as a joke because the main character doesn’t want to share screen-time with anyone which I had a hard time accepting. For me, it only really got its groove going when Deadpool gets into the prison and has Rusty as a new character being his motivation. But I was overjoyed when it introduced a whole slew of characters to create X-Force and does exactly the right thing with most of them. It was a fantastic ride for me right up until the end and the mid-credits sequence absolutely killed me.

Of course as is the case for my wife, all of these references are lost on people who were never into comics. The jokes work so well for me because it feels like they are targeting me specifically. The inclusion of the character of Shatterstar, with his shtick of being better in every way than Deadpool, references Marvel’s trend towards edginess beginning in the 1990s and the method of his death recalls his stupid double-bladed swords. There are jokes about Rob Liefield’s inability to draw feet and his fondness for drawing pouches. I loved the scene in which Cable reaches for an equipment pouch only to retrieve lip balm, finally answering the question of what’s actually in them. it’s all so perfectly calibrated that I am in awe. The references extend outside of comics as well such as the casting of New Zealander Julian Dennison as the poorly named Firefist and I liked all of that.

The action here is excellent as well and I found them more satisfying than Infinity War. I mean characters with top-tier superpowers are great for epic set-piece fights but after a certain power threshold has been crossed, it’s hard to give dramatic weight to these displays of raw power. The power level in a smaller film like Deadpool is about right for the language of cinema, leaving enough room for fight choreography to matter while still being suitably impressive. In order to feel fresh, I think that action films need to keep coming up with cool feats and stuff like Deadpool attempting to strangle enemies with his own crippled arm or Domino lazily cruising through life due to her innate luck rather than skill counts. I really appreciated the attention to detail, such as how Deadpool’s suit keeps all of the damage it has accumulated including being held together using duct tape after he had been torn in half.

Due its R rating and its highly specific references, Deadpool 2 was never going to be mass market pleaser. But that’s fine and might be exactly what is needed to stand out in the crowded superhero genre. The plot is still rather lazy and I dislike fridging loved ones to provide motivation for the characters but on the whole I loved this as a film that has so much more personality than Infinity War.