Deadpool 2 (2018) Review – Cable, X-Force, More Chaos

🎯 Introduction

🧬 This review is part of our X-Men Hub – every X-Men film and show we’ve covered, ranked and explained.

Deadpool 2 had a genuinely hard job: follow up a film that became a cultural phenomenon almost entirely on the strength of one specific voice, without simply repeating the exact same trick a second time. Director David Leitch’s answer is to open with a real, devastating loss for Wade Wilson — no jokes, no fourth-wall cushioning to soften the blow — before pivoting into the biggest, most chaotic comic set piece the franchise had attempted up to that point. It’s a genuinely bold structural choice, and against real odds, it works.

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Deadpool 2 (4K Ultra HD + Digital, Super Duper Cut) (opens in a new tab)

The extended Super Duper Cut adds real material to Cable and Domino's introductions.

My score lands at a near-perfect 4.5/5. The sequel doesn’t quite match the tight, focused structure our Deadpool (2016) review praised across its entire runtime, but scene for scene, it’s frequently funnier, and it takes noticeably bigger risks with its own format than the original ever really needed to.

💔 An Opening That Actually Earns Its Comedy

The film’s willingness to open on real, unsoftened grief before diving back into jokes is a smart structural bet — it gives Wade’s chaos throughout the rest of the film a genuine undercurrent of pain, rather than comedy for its own sake. That grounding is what makes the character’s recruitment of a ragtag “X-Force” team feel like more than just an excuse for set pieces: Wade is trying, badly and clumsily, to matter to someone again after losing absolutely everything that gave his life shape.

The film is also willing to sit with Wade’s grief longer than a typical action-comedy would risk — a stretch in the middle act where he genuinely considers giving up entirely gives Reynolds a chance to play something rawer than the character usually allows, before the plot mechanics of Cable’s arrival and Russell’s rescue give him a new reason to keep going. It’s a real, genuine risk for a film built almost entirely on jokes to take, and it pays off handsomely by making the eventual comic chaos that follows feel properly earned rather than just the film’s default gear.

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Deadpool and Deadpool 2 together — the complete R-rated duology.

🪂 X-Force: The Funniest Set Piece in the Franchise

If there’s one single sequence that defines Deadpool 2 for most viewers, it’s the X-Force team’s debut — Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, and an unpowered regular guy named Peter who simply applied for the job and got accepted anyway, all parachuting in together for a prison-convoy rescue. What follows is a rapid, gleeful subversion of every team-assembly-movie trope in the genre’s playbook: nearly the entire team dies within seconds, in increasingly absurd and creative ways, while Domino’s power (pure, unfiltered luck) makes her the only one who survives completely unscathed. It’s one of the funniest and most structurally daring sequences in the entire franchise, precisely because it commits fully to the bit rather than pulling back to protect any of the new characters for later use.

Zazie Beetz’s Domino is the film’s biggest new addition and an immediate, undeniable scene-stealer — a character whose entire power is simply “things go right for her,” rendered with genuine style and quiet confidence rather than played as a throwaway joke about the power itself.

That the film commits so fully to killing off most of its new team within moments of introducing them, rather than setting up a lingering ensemble it would need to service across future sequels, is also a genuinely confident structural choice. It means the joke lands cleanly without the film owing anything to characters it clearly never intended to keep around for a sequel, and it frees up the back half to focus almost entirely on the Cable/Russell relationship that actually matters most to the story.

⏳ Cable: A Foil Worth the Chaos

Josh Brolin’s Cable — a grim, time-traveling soldier from a devastated future, hunting a troubled young mutant named Russell before he grows into a mass murderer — gives Deadpool a genuinely worthy foil. Brolin plays it completely straight, which is exactly what the film needs: a character who takes the stakes seriously enough that Wade’s constant irreverence has real friction to bounce off of. That contrast is what elevates the film’s back half beyond simple spectacle into something with genuine emotional stakes around Russell’s fate.

Brolin’s casting carries an extra layer of meta-commentary the film happily, gleefully leans into: he played Cable the exact same year he also played Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, and Deadpool’s fourth-wall asides about Brolin’s own suddenly very busy 2018 schedule are some of the film’s sharpest, most self-aware jokes. It’s exactly the kind of gag that only works because the film genuinely trusts its own audience to be paying close enough attention to the wider genre landscape around it to actually catch it.

Russell himself, played by Julian Dennison in a genuinely strong performance, gives the film’s central moral question real texture and weight — a kid with genuinely destructive powers, mistreated by the institutions meant to help him, and drawn toward vengeance by exactly the kind of failure that eventually creates the mass-murdering adult Cable has traveled back in time to stop. Deadpool’s stubborn insistence that Russell can still be saved, set against Cable’s much colder logic that the wider timeline needs protecting at any cost necessary, gives the film’s climax a genuine ethical stake sitting beneath all the surface-level chaos.

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👨‍👦 The Dad Angle: Found Family and Second Chances

Underneath the chaos, Deadpool 2 is fundamentally about a man who’s lost everything trying to build a found family and protect a troubled kid from becoming what the world expects him to become. That’s a genuinely resonant theme, even wrapped in as much profanity and violence as this film carries.

It’s rated R for graphic violence, strong sexual content, and constant profanity — the same hard rating as the original, and just as unsuitable for kids or family viewing. Save this one for after bedtime, the same way you would the first film.

Cable’s time-traveling device gets used for one more joke about franchise history — see our review of the film it’s mocking, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

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Deadpool 2 (4K Ultra HD + Digital, Super Duper Cut) (opens in a new tab)

The extended Super Duper Cut adds real material to Cable and Domino's introductions.

Want to watch it tonight? Prime Video’s 30-day free trial is worth grabbing for a proper Deadpool double feature. Ready to own the whole saga? The Deadpool 3-Movie Collection covers this film through the MCU crossover, and the Marvel Legends Deadpool & Doop figure is the shelf tribute this film’s ill-fated X-Force deserves.

Is Deadpool 2 worth watching?

Yes — it’s a genuine step up in scale from the original while keeping the humor sharp, with Josh Brolin’s Cable and Zazie Beetz’s Domino as standout additions. A strong 4.5/5, held back only slightly from a perfect score by pacing in the middle act.

Who plays Cable in Deadpool 2?

Josh Brolin plays Cable, a time-traveling soldier from a devastated future hunting a troubled young mutant. Brolin gives the character genuine gravity as a foil for Deadpool’s chaos, in a role he took on the same year he played Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War.

What is the X-Force scene in Deadpool 2?

Deadpool assembles a team of mutants — including Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, and Peter, an unpowered regular guy who applied anyway — for a prison-convoy rescue. Nearly the entire team is killed off in a single skydiving disaster moments after their introduction, in one of the franchise’s funniest and most subversive set pieces.

Is Deadpool 2 appropriate for kids?

No — it carries the same hard R rating as the first film, with graphic violence, strong sexual content, and constant profanity. Not appropriate for kids or casual family viewing.

Does Deadpool 2 have a mid-credits or post-credits scene?

Yes, several, and they’re a major part of the film’s appeal — Deadpool uses Cable’s time-travel device to “fix” several moments across the franchise, including a direct joke about the Origins: Wolverine mouth-sewn-shut version of the character.