From the Salt Mines: Deadpool 2, A Tale of Two Fridges

From the Salt Mines: A new occasional series in which I will talk about the things that stick under my craw for various reasons. Future plans include other TV series, several books, and at least one video game. I have a lot of feelings, and not all of them are pleasant ones.

I might have mentioned previously that when it comes to R rated violence, I’m a bit of a weenie. If I haven’t mentioned it, here it is. I’m a weenie about violence. This is why, when I’ve seen almost every other superhero movie out there and this one looked fun and basically right up my alley in all other ways, I’d skipped Deadpool and its sequel entirely until a random weekend in March, when a good friend who loves Deadpool, convinced me to sit in her living room, eat a bunch of snacks, drink some wine, and watch a movie I’d deliberately missed. Knowing my hold ups, she promised to warn me about the super violent parts before they happened. She was mostly good about this (she missed a few), and my viewing of Deadpool for the first time went pretty well, actually.

I loved the first one. The character of Deadpool was everything the previews had promised he would be: hilarious and completely irreverent. Breaking the fourth wall was a hilarious device that was used to perfection. The violence was more than I’d typically watch, but (at least in the first one) over pretty quickly in most places.

But this Salt Mine is not about the first one.

Yes, there are spoilers.

After Wade saves Vanessa at the end of the first one and true love wins over his disfigured face (there’s probably an ableism conversation to have here about that, but I’m not qualified to have it), I offered to move on to the next installment, since I’d actually enjoyed the first. A PG-13 version of the second movie exists, called Once Upon a Deadpool, and includes an introduction and regular interjections from Fred Savage in an homage to The Princess Bride, but she didn’t have that one and understandably didn’t want to pay extra to watch a movie she already owns. R rated version it was then.

The movie opens on a dark note, Wade lying on top of a barrel of some explosive liquid, committing suicide by dropping a match in it, and doesn’t really go up from there. But I truly started hating Deadpool 2 at the thirteen minute mark, because that’s when Vanessa is killed by a guy that Wade had failed to kill in the preceding ten minutes of film. She’s killed on their anniversary, when she’d just announced to Wade that she’d had her IUD removed and they could start a family.

Friends, the reason I hate Deadpool 2 is that it opens on a fridging.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, as director David Leitch and Deadpool 2’s writers (a list that includes Ryan Reynolds) claim to be, fridging is a term coined by Gail Simone in 1999 to define the trope wherein a woman is killed, raped, maimed, or depowered in particular in ways that treated the female character as merely a device to move a male character’s story arc forward.

Cable returns home to tragedy.

Fun fact, this movie actually contains two, possibly three fridgings, if you count Cable’s wife and daughter as two separate instances of fridging. Because I’m full of spite, let’s call it three fridgings. And it’s almost worse for Cable’s family, because they aren’t even given names or speaking lines. At least Vanessa has what passes for a personality. (I say this not in condemnation of Morena Baccarin, who I love, but the lazy writing, which Wade even hangs a lantern on during the film. Pointing it out doesn’t make it less true, Wade.)  

Vanessa is seen several more times throughout the movie, when Wade has close brushes with death, further cementing that her only purpose in this franchise is to serve as a prop for Wade’s man pain.

Now, this movie contains time travel. That’s Cable’s whole entire schtick. Some people have argued (to my face on twitter!) that Cable saving his family and Wade time traveling back to that night to save Vanessa negates the fridging. But y’all, no. That’s not how fridging works. You don’t get to erase it after the whole movie is over, it’s already happened. She died, she sparked the action that lead to the plot, her being dead continued to drive him throughout the plot. She literally existed in this film to be dead and make Wade feel things.

I’m murky on the details of how this time traveling works, basically. Does Wade remember the future? Is he going to go stop Firefist from his first kill so Cable doesn’t have to time travel back? If he doesn’t need them, what would the point of forming the X-Force be now? Who knows?

There are details about a Fox/Disney merger that I’m pretty murky about, but either way, events happened behind the scenes that probably canceled the proposed X-Force sequel that was to have been released in 2020. I haven’t been able to find official word on the future of the franchise, if they’re going to reboot it or keep going with what they’ve got. It’s possible we’ll never see how Wade canceling out the events of the entire movie by saving Vanessa’s life actually play into any sequels

Beyond the fridging, the rest of the story was . . . okay. I enjoyed aspects of the plot, but not the thing as a whole. My favorite ten minute sequence was the assemblance of the X-Force, but then all but one of the members died on the first mission and it all seemed kind of pointless, like the entire movie.

If I’d watched Deadpool in theaters and had waited with great anticipation for Deadpool 2 I would have been a lot angrier, probably. As it is, I’m just really salty.

All image via kissthemgoodbye.net, © Marvel, Disney, and other entities