Crackdown 3 feels almost EXACTLY like playing the original Crackdown so far and.....I think that’s exactly what I want? There’s some differences for sure including more structure to the gameplay than I think is needed, but I’m having a damn good time early on being a crazy supercop again.
Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the weekend after the movie is released in the U.K. So if you haven’t yet seen the movie don’t read on.
General Reaction:
Pop culture references, or "Meta-Referencing" as it's called in some circles, has become such à staple in both movies and television that it is hard to know who originated it. But in terms of who owns it, that largely is Fox as their animated TV shows, such as Family Guy and American Dad, are built around it. However, Deadpool as a character is a meta-referencing construct. Spouting pop culture satire is what he has been known for since his creation, being the "Merc with the Mouth" and fans may worry that if he didn't have that, would he be a quality character.
Well if Deadpool 2 is anything to go by, I'd say that's a yes. Yes there are still meta-references spread throughout this movie, but the movie doesn't rely on them and instead becomes a fully-rounded comic-book action movie. In my opinion more so than the first Deadpool movie and even Avengers: Infinity War in terms of story.
Yes the plot is pretty much ripping off Terminator but it does Terminator how you would expect Deadpool to do Terminator. Not only does it satirically play homage to that movie but also the amount of pot shots it takes both at the MCU and DCEU is fantastic.
My two critiques with the meta-referencing in this movie is 1) There is a joke made about child molesting early on in this movie that hinders on that line of very poor taste and 2) They missed some very obvious chances to make fun of some of the movie's cast that they had no reason to miss. When your main character wears a mask covering his mouth, then the writers and director have no excuses when watching this movie in post and saying "Hey we missed an obvious Billy Skarsgård as Pennywise joke and a joke about Orange is the New Black, Black Panther and Wonder Woman, no worries we can have Ryan Reynolds dub over" but alas there is nothing.
As a fully rounded movie however, there is one thing I never expected to see in a Deadpool movie and that is a genuinely emotional scene, in this case Vanessa's death, yes the first movie had Wade discovering he had cancer, but with this scene there were one or two moments I felt would be used to turn the scene satirical, both with the microwave pinging and Wade's emotional reaction but surprisingly they just kept to the reaction...it was somewhat watered down at the end when Wade went back in time and saved her but I'll get into that when I talk about Vanessa further down.
Cast:
On the subject of characters, much like the first movie this cast proves to be a great support in a movie that is solely the Ryan Reynolds/Deadpool show, unlike the first movie though this cast do just seem to be supporting players.
Ryan Reynolds was born to play Deadpool just as Hugh Jackman was born to play Wolverine and Krysten Ritter was born to play Jessica Jones. What he does with this character is nothing short of magic. I cannot describe just how much I love this actor in this role, this is coming from a guy who has never been a Ryan Reynolds fan...at all.
I love the fact they finally embraced Pansexual Deadpool as he was clearly in a committed relationship with Vanessa but he did have some flirtatious banter with Colossus and even Cable, I mean he used his crotch in Cable’s face as an offensive attack.
Reynolds’ physical comedy is upped in this movie, not only does he have that brilliant crouched over through the legs on a moving car bit that I found quite funny but also the that prison break scene when Wade falls from the walkway smack onto a table with his body effectively bent over was really gross and really cool. I haven’t seen physical comedy this funny since Jim Carrey in the 90s; think Ace Ventura or The Mask, even The Grinch, that is what I was reminded of watching Ryan Reynolds in this movie.
As I said, everyone else was effectively a supporting player but the next two with the biggest roles were Josh Brolin as Cable and Julian Dennison as Russell Collins aka Firefist. What is interesting about both these characters is I have only ever seen them in the 90s X-Men animated series. Cable was a recurring player in all four seasons while Russell was named Rusty and only appeared in one episode during Season 3.
Josh Brolin as Cable was surprisingly very good and the fact he is still appearing as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War was not a distraction because both characters are very different and with the CGI on Brolin for Thanos, there is a definite distinction between the two.
They definitely didn’t spend enough time establishing Cable as a character in his own right, outside of the fact his wife and daughter Hope were killed by an adult Russell which is why he traveled back in time there was no real character development. There was a minor scene when Cable is looking in the mirror at his body and it does seem he’s pained over the fact the techno-organic virus that is never mentioned is trying to take over his body but other than that there is really nothing defining other than the fact he was a formidable threat.
The fact he chose to stay at the end of the movie wasn’t exactly a shocker because Deadpool 2 was a back-door pilot in setting up X-Force, even though he saw that his family were alive because his daughter Hope’s teddy bear that he carries with him which was burned but then looked like new when they fixed the timeline which was a stereotypical time-travel trope but a good one, he decides to stick around for no real reason. When Wade says a line earlier in the movie saying “That’s just bad writing” I was thinking Cable’s ending was more sloppy.
As for Russell Collins aka Firefist, I really didn’t get on board with this character. Yes he was the troubled youth that had trauma in his past and being a Mutant in this universe is never good for anyone of any age, but he was just angry. Yes he had one or two funny lines but most of the time his motivation as a character did not seem genuine. In fact, Russell here reminded me of Jamie Foxx as Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, a character needing to be needed.
Whereas Domino I felt I did not get enough of, genuinely mostly everything we have seen of the character in this movie was in the trailers. She had one or two more good lines particularly with the truck chase but outside of that I was left underwhelmed as a fan of Domino’s because I wanted her to be a scene-stealer similar to Black Widow, Deadpool even calls her “Black Black Widow”.
Colossus again proves to be quite a comedic and competent character despite his earlier appearances in the original X-Men trilogy. The only issue is, we never see him outside of being metallic and yet again Deadpool makes the joke about the studio not being able to afford more X-Men than Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead.
Although there is a fantastic cameo from the X-Men: Apocalypse X-Men team while Deadpool is making this budget speech as the shot cuts to a profile shot of Wade showing a classroom with that team played by those actors in. In the room there is Beast, Quicksilver, Nightcrawler, Storm, Cyclops and bald Professor X all of whom were played by the same actors who portrayed them in X-Men: Apocalypse. It was interesting to see that neither Sophie Turner nor Jennifer Lawrence made an appearance as Jean Grey and Mystique respectively but literally the show was a blink and you will miss it type of shot.
Circling back to Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and I’m going to call her Ellie because it’s easier and that’s her civilian name, again like Domino most of what we’ve seen from her we saw in the trailers but what was confirmed in this movie was her LGBT status.
Now it is not confirmed if she is bisexual or a lesbian but she is in a relationship with Yukio, who I think is supposed to be Surge from the comics but her name is Noriko not Yukio and Yukio is in fact from The Wolverine portrayed by Rila Fukishima in which case I am frustrated with this character because I loved what Rila did with it. Regardless, I applaud this movie because I have recently written up a Research Project for my university course about the lack of LGBT representation in Marvel and this movie gave me hope that maybe they are turning a corner, both with the teenage lesbian lovers and Deadpool’s pansexuality.
I did have the opportunity to meet Brianna Hildebrand at Comic-Con in March but opted out in favour of Yondu but I continue to be happy with her role in these movies.
Then X-Force as a team, the biggest tease I have seen for quite some time, I haven’t seen such a tease lacking followup since The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the promise of the Sinister Six. Almost every trailer in this movie promoted the X-Force team starting in this movie but what the trailers failed to say was that they’d be seen for a grand total of five minutes and then literally be killed off save for Deadpool and Domino.
When you have the likes of Terry Crewes and Bill Skarsgård in the movie, particularly with Billy coming off of such a success with It, yet barely have them speak and don’t really have any screen-time or development before killing them off just to say “We’ve had X-Force” it’s a waste. I mean I get only having Lewis Tan for a glorified cameo as he is more of a stuntman and he was playing a character that would have been all stunts mainly but again it was such a wasted opportunity.
Although the one thing the team did right was give us a bigger shock cameo than Matt Damon in Thor: Ragnarok and I am talking Brad Pitt as Vanisher. Now for most of the time Vanisher was invisible however when he fell down onto the power-lines and got electrocuted to reveal himself as Brad Pitt, the audience I saw this movie gave the biggest reaction all movie. It was such a surprise and such a non-commitment type of role that Pitt didn’t have to do it but either did 20th Century Fox a favour or Ryan Reynolds a favour, either way it actually made me respect him more.
Outside of that brief cameo, the biggest shock for me was the reveal of Juggernaut. I was actually very surprised to see him in this movie. When they “foreshadowed” the character, I genuinely did not know who it was going to be but the fact it was Juggernaut and looking more like Juggernaut than Vinnie Jones did I was loving it. Although I wasn’t so keen on the fact that Ryan Reynolds provided the voice, again Vinnie Jones was great vocally and physically in the role it was just how they styled him I had a problem with. Also the fact he was defeated by essentially having an electric enema was a little bit in poor taste, again there’s a line and Deadpool both as a character and a franchise dance very finely on it.
Then as for Vanessa, I really like Morena Baccarin as an actress but currently I am not entirely sure she knows what role she wants to commit to. Yes she is a mainstay on Gotham and has been fantastic on that all season and it is clear she was not in the first few episodes because of filming this, but then there is the fact she is back voicing Gideon on The Flash which is a minor voice-over role and then there was this but it is such a watered down version of the character from the comics to the point where she was never revealed as a mutant or had her appearance from the comics. Although interestingly enough the character did first appear in the comics as Domino before revealing herself properly.
The end-credits scene which saw Ellie fix Cable’s time-travelling device and stupidly giving it to Deadpool allowed him to go back and save Vanessa, meaning she’s not dead, which if you follow time-travel lore means the events of this movie should not have happened but even so I digress.
Deadpool’s Future:
My final thoughts are on the future of Deadpool in terms of movies because of course there is a pending merger that could threaten that.
I do think that when you consider the fact Fox is in the midst of having it’s movie and television properties going over to Disney, one has to consider if Deadpool and the X-Men have a future. Yes Kevin Feige is going to want to capitalize on Deadpool’s box office to add to his own gross and they have confirmed that Deadpool will stay R-Rated. but the meta-referencing to the MCU may have to be taken out if the character becomes part of the MCU and also if Ryan Reynolds does not continue to have control over the character as he does now then we lose something special.
Now they have said that Deadpool 3 will in fact be an X-Force movie and it is already in negotiations, however I do not believe that any development in terms of script, casting or filming will take place until this merger is confirmed. While I think Deadpool is meta enough to be the only surviving character from Fox in this merger, I do think making the movie as Fox but then either part way through or even at the point of premiere becoming a Disney property would mess up what is currently one of the best comic-book movie franchises out there.
Overall I rate this movie a 9/10, it’s not the best movie I have ever seen however both as the type of comic-book movie it promised and the type of character actor Ryan Reynolds is it is a perfect movie. It just isn’t higher because I do not feel the immediate urge of a rewatchability factor.
So that’s my review of Deadpool 2, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Marvel Movie Reviews as well as other Movie Reviews and posts.
1) Even with more accusations of Amber Heard also abusing Johnny Depp about the hits and physical hits. It still doesn't make the fact that he was still harassing her after the divorce and court case! And also the biophobia reeking around all this towards Amber as well. Also Still had always defended Depp and others like him.
2) Meanwhile Terry Crews was a direct victim of sexual assault people want to instantly cancel him cause of a miscommunication on twitter which he cleared up while sincerely and genuinely apologized for. For me I can't get the logicistics other then the societal need to defend straight white-men for than marginalized groups as I seen it all.
You hit the nail on the head buddy.
If Depp wasn’t Depp, I don’t think people would have any problem dropping him but since a bunch of people grew up with him and dreamed about him, he has to be good. Well, he’s not. Even if it turns out that Amber was lying, he’s still biphobic and he also shows up to work drunk. He has no money and no career right now, he’s desperate.
And like if people care about male victims, why weren’t they talking about Terry or Brendan? Why do they only care about Depp?
It took a long time for Crackdown 3 to make it to market, the last entry in the series, Crackdown 2, was a big disappointment that released all the way back in 2010 and Crackdown 3 was said to be a return to form when it was announced in 2014. It’s been four years since then and we finally have the game in our hands, and thankfully, despite some noticeable issues, it’s a lot of fun that was worth the wait.
Likes:
Quack Quack Mother Fucker:
Crackdown 3 is an unabashedly stupid game, it takes itself less seriously than the original and way less seriously than it’s grimdark predecessor. It helps a lot that the character the game plainly pushes you towards playing is voiced by and modeled after the ever bombastic Terry Crewes. After the second game made the mistake of taking itself so seriously in it’s absurdity I’m glad this one embraces the straightforward weird of Crackdowns hyper chaotic gameplay.
Here Comes The Boom:
Crackdown 3 is a game about blowing up criminals, their trucks and whatever else the big bad may hold dear. It’s not complicated, everything in it is just another excuse to fire another rocket, laser beam or entire clip of a gun into some nameless mook and watch the skill orbs explode out of them like a pinata. It’s refreshingly straightforward in a way that, while not unique to this game, is a ton of fun all the way through. If you’ve played any game in the past few years that builds its backbone on finding and destroying outposts and bases, or finding collectibles than you know the structure of Crackdown 3. Using the agents super powers you’ll find yourself leaping to and from high places, picking up and throwing cars like the hulk and just generally annihilating any resistance below the toughest boss in the game, it’s not a hard game, but it is a fun game.
Dislikes:
Third Game Same As The First:
Beyond some modernization, and a couple of new mechanics like a double jump and the air boosters, Crackdown 3 is almost functionally the same game as the original. Granted the original is a hell of a lot of fun, but Crackdown 3 doesn’t make any meaningful steps forward in design, I suspect a lot of this game was shed over it’s long dev cycle and we ended up with a repeat of the first more out of desire to have a product ready to go than anything else.
One Super-Leap Back:
One really weird thing about Crackdown 3 is that, despite playing exactly like the first game, it adopted a more modern structure to it’s detriment. The original entry did the Breath of the Wild thing before Breath of the Wild was even a thought, you were expected to find interesting visual sights and track your goals accordingly. Crackdown 3 just flat out tells you where your goals are, taking away some of the magic of tracking down the criminals on your own.
collecting agility orbs though? That magic never fades.
