Summary
The original film with all the blood and most of the swearing replaced with something even more Savage. They like to call in unsolicited location enhancement.”
As the titular character is fond of reminding us, Deadpool was one of the most successful R-rated films of all time. Its modest budget led to a massive success and an inevitable sequel, revitalising Fox’s Marvel properties with a healthy sense of self-awareness. So the PG-13 reworking of Deadpool 2 is something of an oddity: a bloodless edit where the “only F-bomb is Fred Savage.”
In a newly shot series of interludes, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) has kidnapped Savage (playing himself) and has trapped him in an almost perfect recreation of his bedroom set from The Princess Bride. Deadpool proceeds to tell Savage a familiar bedtime story.
After that, the film is simply an edited version of Deadpool 2. In fact, IMDB and Letterboxd don’t even distinguish them as separate entities. In the spirit of ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL, let’s flash back to the review of the original cut now. Go on. We’ll wait here. It’s cool.
Now wasn’t that a fun trip down memory lane? “It’s possible,” we commented in the review you just revisited (unless you cheated),”[that] once the initial shock value wears off there’s a certain repetition to the whole thing.” It’s like ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL read this and asked us to hold its beer.
In the new segments, we get some more meta commentary on lazy writing, fridging female characters, and on Deadpool’s place in pop culture. Savage geeks out about Cable, giving us a potted summary of his complex history at Marvel while acknowledging his superficial screen transition. There’s even a visual tribute to the late Stan Lee, digitally inserted as a wall mural. At its most timely, Savage and Deadpool debate the merits of the various ownership arrangements of Marvel properties. “You’re Marvel licensed by Fox,” argues Savage. “It’s like if The Beatles were produced by Nickelback.”
ONCE UPON A DEADPOOL has fun with its own censorship, bleeping sentences to make them sound far filthier than they actually are. As much of the blood was originally digitally inserted, here Fox have literally just turned the splatter button off. Yet it’s still incredibly violent, filled with the same amount of gunplay and decent serving of ‘S-bombs.’ Younger audiences need not apply, so the target audience remains as elusive as a successful DC Extended Universe film. (They’ve also left in T.J. Miller, despite some rather public controversy of late).
Devoid of any specific Christmas content, this seasonal release mostly leaves us wondering what the point of this outing actually was. Was it proof of concept that a Disney-owned Deadpool could still be ‘edgy’? Deadpool breaking through more fourth walls to comment on his own commentary? Or merely a cash-grab ? In the words of Fred Savage, it’s as “if Rocky Dennis had a baby with lava.”
2018 | US | DIR: David Leitch | WRITERS:Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Ryan Reynolds | CAST: Ryan Reynolds, Fred Savage, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Julian Dennison, Zazie Beetz, T.J. Miller, Brianna Hildebrand, Jack Kesy | DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Fox (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 16 May 2018 (AUS)
