With Deadpool 2 already a hit in its opening weekend, the Deadpool film empire has cemented itself as one of the most successful R-Rated franchises in movie history. Granted, there are not a whole lot of R-rated film franchises to compare it against, but there are enough out there that it is still an impressive achievement. The Deadpool films are not just successful for general film audiences, they are also big hits with comic book fans. This is because the Deadpool films have respected the comic books that the films are based on a whole lot more than most non-Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero films. Comic book fans clearly respect films that respect the original material. Shocker, we know.
While the Deadpool films have been great successes both critically and commercially, that does not mean that they are not without their flaws. We are not talking about jokes falling flat or whether it was reductive for them to kill off that one character in Deadpool 2, we mean things that just did not make sense in the films. These are often not things that affect our enjoyment of the films, but they still don't really work. So here, we have a collection of 20 of the most inexplicable events of the Deadpool film franchise so far.
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Deadpool 2, which is in theaters now.
20 WHY IS THE ESSEX HOUSE A THING?
A big plot point in Deadpool 2 is that Russell Collins, Firefist, is driven to become a supervillain after he suffered abuse at the hands of the headmaster and orderlies at The Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation. The problem with that is, how does The Essex House for Mutant Rehabilitation even exist in a world with the X-Men in it? It is one thing if an organization is running an underground base where mutants are experimented on. That sort of thing is to be expected. However, this is right out in the open!
At the end of the film, when the X-Men show up to help Deadpool and his X-Force, Yukio and Negasonic Teenage Warhead mention that they will bring the orphans to the X-Mansion. That is great to hear, but why was that only happening following Russell's attack on Essex House? Why was this place allowed to run for as long as it did without anyone doing anything about it? This wasn't a case where parents were forcing their kids to stay, these were orphans who the X-Men apparently just didn't care that much about despite clearly knowing that bad things were happening to them. Why didn't they step in earlier?
19 "WHERE'S FRANCIS?"
One of the most notable sequences in the original Deadpool was when Wade discovered that Ajax's real name is Francis. Up until that point, Ajax had worn an armor of steely disinterest, but once Wade learned that little bit of hidden truth about Ajax -- a name that he did not want anyone else to know about -- Wade exploited it for all that it was worth. Ajax's anger towards him over the incessant use of his name led to Ajax screwing up and ultimately letting Wade go free.
Once he was free, though, Wade had to go find Ajax because he believed that he could cure him entirely. He then set out to find him, becoming Deadpool in the process. Here is the problem, though. He hunts down anyone who might have done business with Ajax, but he keeps asking them the same question, "Where's Francis?" As you might have figured out already, the issue with that is that Francis is Ajax's hidden name. So why would that be the name that you used while trying to find him? Wouldn't "Where's Ajax?" be much more likely to result in a successful result? Had he found Ajax sooner, he would never have placed Vanessa into harm's way, as well.
18 HOW DID DEADPOOL SURVIVE THE EXPLOSION?
At the start of Deadpool 2, we see Deadpool about to kill himself. We learn why when we discover that a failed hit on a Russian mob boss accidentally led a bunch of killers to Deadpool and Vanessa's apartment, and while Deadpool was able to kill most of the crooks, he was unable to kill their boss before he shot and killed Vanessa. Wade managed to track down the boss and kill him as well, but he could not find a way to kill the man who he ultimately blamed for Vanessa's death -- himself.
So he buckled down and figured that he would find a way to finally kill himself. His final solution was to drag six drums of kerosene to his apartment, let the room fill with gas from the stove and then light the whole thing up, leading to an explosion that we literally see blow Deadpool to pieces. When we next we see him, he has recovered at the X-Mansion, with his body back intact. How in the world did that work? Colossus mentioned collecting all of Deadpool's body parts, so, what... do you just place his body parts next to each other and they all sort of re-assemble? Deadpool's healing factor already doesn't make sense, but this really doesn't make sense!
17 HIS HEALING FACTOR ISN'T EVEN CONSISTENTLY ILLOGICAL
Here's the thing: let's say that you even buy the concept that Colossus was able to pick up Deadpool's pieces after he exploded at the start of Deadpool 2 and then put the pieces together and they sort of merged together. That doesn't make any sense, but still, let's say that we somehow buy into that concept as making some kind of comic book movie sense. Even if you buy into that nonsensical situation, it then completely contradicts itself later in the film!
Later in the movie, when Deadpool finds himself facing off against the Juggernaut, he soon learns why that is such a bad thing, because the Juggernaut literally tears Deadpool into two pieces. Here, though, we see Deadpool simply regrow his body parts not by re-attaching them, but rather by having his legs re-grow from being little baby legs to being full-size legs. Even if you put aside the inconsistency from how he healed earlier in the movie, the growth rate also did not make sense. He lost his legs on the afternoon of Day 1. A day later, they were just little baby legs and yet they were fully re-grown within a couple of hours. We get that his healing factor doesn't make sense period, but still.
16 WHEN DID DEADPOOL BEFRIEND THE X-MEN?
The first Deadpool film was a unique superhero origin story in that we saw pretty much everything that happened to Deadpool to get him to the point where the movie started, with him attacking a convoy that Ajax was in. We saw him work as a mercenary named Wade Wilson. We saw him come down with cancer. We saw him try all sorts of treatments that did not work. We saw him get experimented on by Ajax that led to him gaining healing powers but becoming permanently disfigured. We saw him become a costumed vigilante named Deadpool and hunt Ajax down to get the disfigurement cure Ajax claimed to have. We then saw him finally catch up to Ajax at the start of the movie.
Well, guess what does not fit into that timeline? Him meeting and befriending the X-Men. When Colossus sees Deadpool's highway brawl on TV, he says, "I’ve given Deadpool every chance to join us. But he’d rather act like a child. A heavily armed child. When will he grow up and see benefits of becoming X-man?" Soo... huh? He's given him "every chance to join" the X-Men? When could that have possibly happened in the film's timeline?
15 WHY DID THE COLLARS BREAK SO EASILY?
A major plot point in Deadpool 2 was the introduction of the special power-canceling collars that the government agents were using when Russell and Deadpool were both arrested in the movie. When the film began, Deadpool was in a very bad place in his life and wanted to die. Thus, when he had the power-canceling collar put on to him at the Ice Box prison, he welcomed the return of his fatal cancer that came with the loss of his powers. The thing is, when the collars were put on, a big part of their set-up was that they were near impossible to remove.
However, when Cable attacked the Ice Box and Deadpool tried to fight back, Deadpool ended up falling from a prison catwalk on to a cafeteria table, breaking his back in multiple places, but also breaking the collar off, thus allowing him to survive the horrific back injury. So, apparently, the collars cannot be destroyed unless you have a grenade... or a one story drop? That makes the collars a heck of a lot easier to remove, which completely alters the big moment at the end of the film when Deadpool put one on and vowed that he would be willing to sacrifice himself to save Russell.
14 WHY DID CABLE NOT JUST BREAK DEADPOOL'S COLLAR?
This one ties into the general "the collars are too easy to break" point. Since the collars were so easy to break, it seems clear that either Colossus or even Cable, using his cybernetic arm, could have broken the collar off of Deadpool at the end of Deadpool 2. That is not even counting the fact that apparently Domino could get the collar open at any point by guessing the one-digit pass code, as it is fair to note that Cable did not realize that was an option at the time.
The reason that is a big issue for the film's story is that it makes Cable's decision to go back in time and save Deadpool's life seem kind of pointless. He had exactly one time travel charge left to send himself back to the future, but he decided to instead use it to go back in time to place the lead game token he had taken from Deadpool onto Deadpool's chest, right where the bullet was going to hit him. So, he decided to ignore Deadpool's plea to just allow him to die, but did it in the much harder way that had a bigger negative impact on himself? That doesn't make sense.
13 HOW DID DEADPOOL KNOW WHERE AJAX WAS?
We have already pointed out how it did not really make much sense in the first Deadpool film how Deadpool used the name "Francis" to try to track down Ajax. What is even odder is that when he finally tracked down someone who did know Francis, it was the man who recruited Wade in the first place, and Wade did not need to know Ajax's name to track the recruiter down; he literally just caught the recruiter in the middle of recruiting two other test subjects! Anyway, however he got to the point, the important thing is that he found someone who knew Ajax.
That, though, does not explain how we cut from him meeting the recruiter to him knowing precisely where Ajax was going to be on the highway the following day. We can certainly believe that the recruiter knew who Ajax was, but it strains credulity that he knew Ajax's schedule the next day so perfectly that Deadpool could time the precise moment that Ajax's convoy was going to pass under the highway overpass where Deadpool had stationed himself. It would be one thing if we just saw Deadpool improvising on the highway, but he was shown to have a very detailed plan somehow.
12 HOW WAS CABLE'S TIME MACHINE FIXED SO EASILY?
As noted earlier, a dramatic moment at the end of Deadpool 2 was Cable deciding that he would use up the last bit of his time travel charge -- a charge he was saving so that he could return home to see his wife and daughter again -- to go back in time and alter events so that Deadpool could live. The fact that that was it for his time travel device was the whole point behind the dramatic gesture.
So it really did not make any sense for Deadpool to take his time travel device and give it to Negasonic Teenage Warhead and just have her fix it herself right afterwards. First of all, how was it possible for someone in the present to fix Cable's futuristic time travel device, especially someone who doesn't have any sort of special mutant fixing powers, like Forge? Secondly, if it was possible for his time travel device to be repaired in the past, why in the world wouldn't Cable look into that himself? We understand that he decided to dedicate himself to trying to fix his awful future by improving things in the present, but you would think he would still at least want the option to return home.
11 HOW DID AJAX GET AWAY UNSEEN?
Deadpool's quest for revenge looked like it was going to resolve itself very soon into the first Deadpool movie when he decimated everyone else in Ajax's convoy except for Ajax. So when a man in a helmet drove out in a motorcycle to try to escape from the carnage, Deadpool was pretty sure that it was Ajax. He threw his sword at the motorcycle and caused it to crash. He came upon the person and removed his helmet to reveal that, yep, this was Ajax! He then stabbed him through the shoulder to pin him to the side of the highway.
Then Colossus showed up right when Deadpool was going to start beating Ajax. Colossus picked Deadpool up and threw him into a car. However, it is important to note that Deadpool kept track of Ajax during this whole time. First, Colossus tells Ajax to stay right there. Then, while talking with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Deadpool punches Ajax. He then hits him in the head with a metal disc. Then, he turns around, and Ajax has somehow pulled out the sword without anyone noticing, he has also gotten to his motorcycle and driven off without anyone noticing! It didn't make any sense.
10 WHAT DID SAVING VANESSA DO TO THE TIMELINE?
With Cable's time travel device now fixed at the end of Deadpool 2, Deadpool goes back in time and fixes some injustices. He saves Peter from being killed by Zeitgeist's vomit. He kills off the Deadpool from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. He kills Ryan Reynolds before he could star in Green Lantern. And, of course, he kills the bad guy who killed Vanessa before he could fire the fatal bullet that ended her life.
Okay, sooo.... huh? What does that mean? Is Vanessa alive now? Did this just create an alternate timeline where she is alive? If it actually affected the normal timeline, then how does that work? If Deadpool got involved in saving Russell only because of the very specific events that took him to meeting Russell, which included Vanessa dying, then if she did not die, would Cable have just killed Russell and been done with it? Would all of the members of X-Force who died not be dead anymore? If Deadpool then never got involved with Cable, then Cable never could have used up his time travel device saving Deadpool, so he would have gone back to the future without leaving anything behind, in which case, how did Deadpool get the time travel device in the first place to go back in time? None of this was explained.
9 HOW IS DOPINDER NOT IN JAIL?
At the beginning of Deadpool 2, we see that Dopinder is still working as a taxi cab driver. However, he wants to transition into becoming a contract killer like Deadpool. In fact, he wants Deadpool to be his mentor like Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Instead, he mostly just ends up cleaning up Weasel's bar. The inexplicable thing, however, is that the film even addresses how the ending of the previous Deadpool movie sure didn't make it look like Dopinder would be free to do any of this.
At the end of Deadpool, Dopinder was inspired by Deadpool into kidnapping Bantu, his romantic rival to Gita, the love of Dopinder's life. Bantu is locked up in the trunk of Dopinder's taxi when the taxi gets into an accident at the end of the film, apparently killing Bantu. That he died was confirmed in Deadpool 2. Therefore, that obviously does not make any sense. How did Dopinder not get into trouble for the kidnapping and subsequent death of Bantu? You can come up with theories about how Deadpool helped him cover it up, but none of that is explained in either film.
8 WHY DID DEADPOOL SHARE A CELL WITH RUSSELL?
There were a lot of things that are up in the air about the agents who took Russell and Deadpool into custody in Deadpool 2. They wore uniforms with DMC written on them and it was not even explained in the movie what that stood for, exactly. In the X-Men movies, Beast was a representative of the Department of Mutant Affairs, so it is likely that the new acronym stands for Department of Mutant Control, but the film is silent on whether that was the case or not.
Now, setting side the legal logistics required for arresting someone and instantly throwing them into the equivalent of "the hole," the entire Ice Box concept doesn't really follow any reasonable logic, since they put Deadpool into the same cell as Russell. Even a monolithic, tyrannical state would know that it doesn't make sense to make an adult and a teenager share a cell. Not only that, but as far as everyone knew, these two were working together, so why would you put people that you believe to be criminal partners into the same cell? How would that make any sense for the prison? "Who could have guessed that the criminal collaborators would have worked together to escape?"
7 HOW DID ANGEL DUST KNOW WHERE VANESSA WORKED?
Often in a story, a writer might find themselves written into a corner. They need to get to the next step in the plot, but there's no clear way to get there. Peter David once found himself stuck in an issue of Incredible Hulk where he had Rick Jones stowed away on a flying saucer that was about to explode and David couldn't think of a way for Rick to escape. So he had Rick jump out of the ship and use the secret parachute that he has on himself at all times in case he needs to jump out of flying saucers. When another character points out how absurd that is, Rick counters that, hey, he needed it, didn't he?
Similarly, in the original Deadpool, Ajax and Angel Dust need to hunt down Deadpool. But how? They visit the bar where Deadpool hangs out and they see a photo of Wade Wilson and his girlfriend, Vanessa. Luckily for the plot of the film, Angel Dust somehow recognizes Vanessa and knows where she works. We never saw Vanessa and Angel Dust interact at any point in the film and heck, Angel Dust never even saw Vanessa's photo at any point in the film before she sees her in the bar. This was lucky for the plot, but not so luckily for logic, she just happens to know precisely the exact woman she would need to know for their plan to work.
6 WHY DID DEADPOOL SHOW UP IN A TAXI TO SAVE VANESSA?
The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of scenes in the original Deadpool movie were dictated by the relatively small budget allotted for the film. There is a hilarious sequence where Deadpool collects all of his guns for the final scene but then forgets his gun bag in the car before the battle begins. This was because the film makers could not afford a big, lengthy gun battle. Thus, they came up with what ended up being one of the most memorably funny scenes in the movie. Not only that, but it made a certain amount of sense. People do forget stuff in cabs, after all.
That, though, leads us to the aspect of the scene that doesn't make any sense, which is that Deadpool would show up to save the love of his life in a cab. Once again, this was clearly a case where the budget of the film constrained them from spending more money on the final battle, so that is why they arrived in a cab instead of the X-Men's Blackbird. That's the reason outside the film, at least -- they do not bother to give an explanation within the film itself. He's desperate to save his girlfriend, but not so desperate to insist on using the best option to actually save her.
5 WHY DIDN'T CABLE JUST GO BACK TO THE PRISON?
In a dramatic sequence in Deadpool 2, Cable shows up at the Ice Box and begins wreaking havoc, all in his attempt to kill Russell. Deadpool fights him off for a bit, but without his powers, there is not a whole lot that he can do. Then, his collar is broken off and he is able to do more damage. He and Cable fight and eventually are knocked out of the prison and fall to the mountain below. Cable stops himself before Deadpool does, so Deadpool continues to fall down into a frozen lake below.
Okay, so Deadpool is now out of commission. The prison is in chaos. Cable obviously can travel to places pretty easily, just like how he got into the prison in the first place, so being on the bottom of the mountain should not be a problem to him. So why did Cable not simply go back into the prison to kill Russell? What was there to be gained from him waiting at that moment? It helped serve the movie, as if he got up there and killed Russell, the movie would just be over, but there was not a good reason why he just walked away then.
4 WHAT HAPPENED IN THE WATER?
One of the fascinating questions about Deadpool (and Wolverine) is how can they survive drowning? Healing factors shouldn't play a role if you have simply been drowned, right? Because even if you could heal yourself, you'd just drown all over again, if you're stuck under a frozen lake. That's actually been one of the major reasons why Wolverine tends to avoid swimming, since his adamantium-laced skeleton is so heavy that it makes it difficult for him to swim and he knows that if he is pulled under, he is in a bad situation. So when Wade fell into the frozen lake in Deadpool 2, that should have been a major problem for him.
And sure enough, it did get him to the point of near-death, with him meeting Vanessa for a second time, before she sent him back to the land of the living. That's fair enough, but the next shot we see is him, essentially, being launched out of the frozen lake. What in the world happened there? Did he, like, super swim out of the water? Did the power of death launch him from the frozen entrance? It really did not make any sense. Perhaps they just thought it was a better visual than him slowly climbing out of the lake?
3 WHAT ARE AJAX'S POWERS, EXACTLY?
Ajax is handled very oddly in the first Deadpool film. What are his powers, exactly? He tells us that he can no longer feel pain. Okay, fair enough, but what does that mean, exactly? Early on in the film, when Deadpool finally tracks Ajax down, he easily defeats him, which would make sense, since it appears as though Deadpool has enhanced reflexes to go with his healing powers. Ajax also appears to have enhanced reflexes, as well, to go with his lack of pain receptors, but when they fought again on the helicarrier, suddenly Ajax was just as good of a fighter as Deadpool.
It really did not make any sense for Ajax to suddenly become such a great fighter, especially when his powers, in theory, really are not all that helpful in a fight (other than the super strength he briefly exhibits). People who cannot feel pain are at a bigger risk of having problems with their bodies that they cannot deal with because they don't know that there is a problem. Let us say that Ajax breaks a bone in a fight. It will affect his ability to fight, but he might not even know it at first because he can't feel pain. It doesn't follow that he would suddenly be able to go toe to toe with Deadpool at the end of the movie.
2 WHERE DOES THIS FIT IN WITH X-MEN CONTINUITY?
This problem is really more of an X-Men problem than it is a Deadpool one, but either way, it ends up with the X-Men's appearance in Deadpool 2 not making any sense. You see, when the X-Men film series rebooted with X-Men: First Class, they had a major problem with the fact that they locked the first movie into occurring in the early 1960s. The issue is that these people just don't age! The third X-Men prequel film, X-Men: Apocalypse, is set two decades after X-Men: First Class, and yet Professor X and Beast have barely aged.
In addition, that film is now set more than 30 years before Deadpool 2, and yet all of the X-Men in the cameo in the film looked like they did in the 1980s. Obviously, their cameo was just meant as a joke, but it is a joke that still ties in with the fact that the continuity of the X-Men films are all over the place. It would be one thing if they just treated this as its own continuity, which was possible when they had only Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead in the film, but bringing in the other X-Men just made it all kinds of nuts.
1 HOW DID VANESSA SURVIVE HER FALL?
The climactic battle of the first Deadpool movie took place on a decommissioned S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier (although convienently not labeled as a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier because Fox does not have the rights to the S.H.I.E.L.D. name), with Ajax holding Deadpool's ex-girlfriend, Vanessa, hostage in one of the same oxygen deprivation torture chambers that Wade was kept in when they experimented on him.
During the battle, Negasonic Teenage Warhead accidentally knocks out one of the support columns holding the helicarrier aloft and thus, the whole thing came tumbling down. Deadpool had to think quickly to save Vanessa's life, so he throws her back into the oxygen deprivation machine. Everything crashes to the ground and then Deadpool goes to get out of the machine and she's all okay. Why in the world would that have worked? How would going into an oxygen deprivation machine protect you from such a big fall, with all of the other debris falling down, as well? It was literally a glass case! Yes, it was strong glass, but there is no way that it could have been strong enough to survive that fall without her getting injured at all. It was nice that Deadpool and Vanessa got a happy ending, but it did not make sense.