Genre: Superhero
Premise: When a time-traveler comes back from the future to kill the boy who murdered his family, it will be up to Deadpool and his new super duper team to stop him.
About: There’s a sneaky sub-story regarding today’s film that the trades are trying to sweep under the rug. Deadpool 2 made 125 million dollars this weekend. That’s 7 million dollars less than the first Deadpool made on its opening weekend. The trades hate when one of their darlings underperforms because it means they have to come up with an angle that excuses the performance despite a history of tearing apart films with similar results. The spin they’re going with here is that Deadpool did better globally in its first weekend than the first film did. But that’s largely because they opened on more screens this time around. The thing is, Deadpool 2 does deserve a pass. It’s a better film than the first one. Its underperformance is the doing of its studio, which placed it between Avengers and Star Wars, possibly the worst release date in the past 10 years. Why not place Deadpool in June where the waters are calmer? I don’t know. But Deadpool 2 will leave between 100-200 million dollars on the table due to this bizarre decision.
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds (based on the comic by Rob Liefeld & Fabian Niciza)
Details: 2 hours long
BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP. Backing up the Spoiler Truck guys. If you get run over, it’s your fault.
I have a lot to say about this one so let’s jump right into it!
Deadpool 2 starts in typical Deadpool fashion, with Deadpool blowing himself up. But the curse of being Deadpool is that he can’t die. So like Humpty-Dumpty, they put him back together again. A few scenes later, Deadpool shows us the reason he killed himself. A bad guy pops into his apartment and shoots Vanessa in the heart. Yes, Vanessa, from the previous film is dead.
Meanwhile some dude named Cable, who’s from the future, is also suffering from family tragedy. His wife and son were murdered by a firestarting super-villain. So Cable time-travels back to 2018 to kill the offending villain, a mutant 12 year old boy named Russell, before he can begin his decades-long killing spree that ends in the murder of his family.
Deadpool is reluctantly recruited into the X-Men, which means he has to do good, and his first order of goodness is to save Russell. But being Deadpool, he has to do things his way. So he recruits a team of the worst superheroes imaginable, calling them X-Force. It’s then a race for X-Force and Cable to see who gets to the boy first.
To stand out amongst an entertainment machine that pumps out thousands of hours of content every day, millions if you count the internet, when you write a script, you must give us things that we’ve never seen before.
That doesn’t mean you have to give us a movie concept we’ve never seen before. It’d be nice. That’s what the original Deadpool did. It gave us a fourth-wall breaking R-rated superhero. But it’s hard to find those ideas.
So the next best thing is to give us moments WITHIN YOUR SCREENPLAY that we’ve never seen before. One great original moment is nice. Two is better. And anything over two is awesome. Deadpool 2 gives us three moments.
The first is the opening credits scene. For those who haven’t seen the film, Deadpool’s wife, Vanessa, is killed in the fourth scene of the movie. It’s an emotional moment. I was genuinely shocked. These two were set up as the perfect couple in the first film.
The title sequence that follows, a James Bond parody set to a surprisingly catchy Celine Dion song, begins listing the credits. Except they aren’t what we expect. “Produced by: Wait a minute, did you just fucking kill her?” “Directed by: Are you insane?” Director of Cinematography by: “Holy shit, you really fucking killed her.” (paraphrased).
This was clever, not just because we’d never seen it before. But what you probably don’t know is that credit sequences are unionized. It’s hard to change them. Unions did this to prevent situations where producers kept their credit on screen for 60 seconds. Or say the studio hated the job the costume designer did. This would prevent them from simply not including her credit.
I bring this up because there’s a bigger issue at play here. There are things that we believe are “set.” That can’t be changed. So we don’t even consider it. I’m assuming the reason it took so long for someone to think of this was because everyone assumed you can’t change a title sequence. You had to accept them. This is a reminder that everything is open for change. There should be no avenue closed off from your imagination.
The second moment was the X-Force fail. This was my favorite sequence in the movie. I knew something was up because the superheroes looked super cheesy, even for a movie that made fun of superheroes. But I didn’t think they were going to kill them off before they fought a single battle! That was brilliant, and the one time in the movie where I couldn’t stop laughing.
Finally we had baby legs. I wasn’t a fan of this scene. A lot of people think the baby-adult hybrid thing is funny. They’ve done a lot of Super Bowl commercials covering it. But it’s too weird for me. Regardless, there’s a lesson to be learned here as well. This is one of the most talked about sequences in the film, and it’s six people in an apartment. This is what I remind writers who think that the only way to catch a reader’s attention is to go bigger. No. This scene proves that the smallest scenes can be the most memorable. You just have to be creative.
But maybe the biggest surprise of Deadpool 2 was how character-driven it was. I’d just done a screenplay consultation for a writer who wrote an action film. And my big note to him was, “You need to give us more character development so that we care about these characters during the action.”
As I was writing that, I realized that the average screenwriter has no idea how to do this. Their understanding of character development in an action film is to write one scene every 30 pages where two characters are in a room, resting, and one of them gives the other a monologue about their troubled childhood.
Deadpool 2 is about 30% action. This means 70% of the film is covering character. Seeing Cable’s reaction to the aftermath of his dead family is character development. Deadpool whining to a bartender after his wife died is character development. Seeing quick flashes of Russell being tortured is character development. Seeing Deadpool rage-kill the man who killed his wife is character development. Deadpool and Cable having a difference of opinion on how to treat Russell is character development. Cable carrying around his boy’s burnt stuffed bunny is character development. Deadpool’s dreams where he’s back with his wife are character development. Russell desperate to find a friend he can trust is character development. In fact, Russell’s entire character (a boy who’s been abused his whole life and is now taking it out on the world) is character development.
I reminded the writer that anybody can write action. But very few writers can develop character. That’s the hot commodity in screenwriting. If you can do that? Hollywood will hire you from now until the end of time.
As much as I admired the crafting of Deadpool – the chances it took and the overall writing – I did have one problem with it. Its biggest strength – Ryan Reynolds – is also its biggest weakness. The fourth-wall-breaking joke-a-minute schtick is tiring. It’s so tiring. Yes, Deadpool does it better than anyone. But it’s still a gimmick. And gimmicks have short shelf lives. Note how in Ferris Bueller, Ferris only does the fourth wall breaking in that opening sequence. During the rest of the movie, it happens only a handful of times. And that’s because John Hughes knew that the audience would get tired of it. Deadpool’s commentary started to irk me towards the end. And that’s the only reason this movie doesn’t finish with an impressive.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Action films have way less action than you think they do. It’s roughly around 30% of screen time, usually less. Let this be a lesson that you need to learn to develop character if you’re going to be a successful writer in this genre.
