Deadpool 2, trimmed for American teenagers, with a kidnapped Fred Savage added at the edges. The bedtime-story scenes are the best thing here and there are about fifteen minutes of them. The rest is a film you have seen, with the swearing bleeped and the point blunted.
Once Upon a Deadpool is Deadpool 2 with the blood mopped up, the swearing bleeped and about a quarter of an hour of new material wrapped around the outside. It reached British cinemas on 11 December 2018, in time for Christmas, under the tagline “Yule believe in miracles”, which tells you how seriously anybody involved was taking it. The idea was to sell the same picture a second time to American teenagers who had been too young for the first, with some of the ticket money going to charity. Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds wrote both the original and the trimmings, and the trimmings are the reason to bother.
The new scenes are a sketch, and a good one. Wade Wilson (Reynolds) has kidnapped Fred Savage and tied him to a bed in a copy of the bedroom from The Princess Bride, the 1987 film Savage appeared in as a child, and he reads him the story of Deadpool 2 while Savage complains. Savage is the best thing in the picture. He plays a grown man under a duvet with a grievance, and he argues with the story rather than the storyteller: the plotting, the language, the awkward question of who actually owns these characters. We laughed, properly and more than once, at the sight of a man refusing to be read to, and the reason it works is that Savage plays it straight while Reynolds mugs. There are perhaps fifteen minutes of this in a 118-minute film.
The film in between was good in its first form and much of it still is. Wade joins the X-Men as a trainee, is sent to an orphanage where Firefist (Julian Dennison) is setting fire to a Headmaster (Eddie Marsan) who has earned it, and ends up in a mutant prison a cell away from the boy. Cable (Josh Brolin), a soldier from the future with a metal arm, arrives to kill him. Brolin plays Cable as a man who has never heard a joke and does not intend to start, and it is the right choice against Reynolds. Dennison is a big, sulky, wounded kid and the film’s heart, such as it is. Zazie Beetz’s Domino, whose power is luck, gets the best set piece in either version, a convoy chase in which things fall her way while everybody else is shot at. Weasel (T.J. Miller), Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) and Dopinder (Karan Soni) supply the rest of the jokes and most of them survive the scissors.
The action does not. Deadpool’s violence was the punchline: bodies came apart in ways so silly that the gore was the joke. Take the gore away and you are left with the set-up. A fight in a prison yard, a run of parachute landings that go catastrophically wrong, Wade’s regular dismemberments: they now happen a frame after the camera has looked away, and David Leitch, who made his name on fights you could follow blow by blow, has his work chopped around every impact. The bleeps sit on top of Tyler Bates’s score like somebody leaning on a piano. We were bored during that convoy chase, which had thrilled us the first time, and then we were irritated, because nothing had been added to the scene and something had plainly been taken out. Reynolds also voices the Juggernaut, which the credits admit and the film hopes you will not notice.
Against the standard of the first Deadpool, which was cheap and rude and knew one trick, this is the same film with the trick removed. Against the standard of a bedtime story, the Savage scenes point at a better idea: a whole picture of Deadpool reading to somebody who hates him, which nobody had made. Instead they are a wrapper. The part that is new is short and the part that is long is not new.
It carries a 15 certificate here, so the audience it was cut down for still cannot get in, and the people who can have seen it already. Most critics landed near where we have, half amused and half puzzled about why it exists. If you have seen Deadpool 2, the Savage scenes are worth finding and the rest is a good moment to put the kettle on. If you have not, watch Deadpool 2.
