The Second Coming of Wade Wilson

Nobody asked superheroes to be funny again—they just were, once, and then they weren’t, and then Deadpool arrived and reminded everyone what the genre looked like when it wasn’t afraid of itself.

The first film was a minor miracle: R-rated, fourth-wall-breaking, genuinely crude, and better than most of the bloodless blockbusters surrounding it. Ryan Reynolds had been circling this role for nearly a decade, and when it finally happened you could feel the relief in every frame. Whether he was born to play Wade Wilson or Wade Wilson was written for him no longer matters—they’re the same person now.

The trailer for Deadpool 2 is everything it should be: ninjas, the Yakuza, inexplicably hostile dogs, and a loose philosophy that places friends, family, and good taste as life’s three essential non-negotiables. That’s the joke, and also somehow not entirely a joke. The best superhero films are about something underneath the spectacle. Deadpool’s something is loneliness wearing comedy as a disguise.

The first film deserves a revisit before the sequel lands. If you’ve somehow avoided it, the internet will make that decision for you soon enough. It holds up better than it has any right to—one of the better arguments for why cinema as a format still matters, which is a strange thing to say about a movie centered on a man who heals from being turned into a human kebab, but here we are.