Most of the meta stuff seemed less shoehorned in (save for the very beginning and very end) and same goes for most of the "shock" humor. Felt in the first that the buckshot approach to this made the overall movie fairly blah. Here, it's in there, but not as forced-- a little more precision. Didn't love all of those bits, but the execution successfully felt less overtly draped in thick layers of irony than the last one. I like Deadpool's irony/meta vibe in the comics, but in the movie, you have to find a story to tell that services his vibe well-- I thought the last film was too goddamn cliche-riddled and overall boring story-wise to make shit work. The frenetic pace and the abundance of straight man characters for DP to bounce off of worked really well here.

Also, they put the bulk of the focus not on the R-rating/irony stuff but mostly on the fact that nearly every character is annoyed by Deadpool. They also poked fun at tropes less through blatant reference but more often through action (the fact that everyone died after the skydiving sequence was by itself better and more "Deadpool" imo than anything in the first movie).

I went in really pessimistic but emerged fairly impressed. I'd see an X-Force film.

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