Deadpool & Wolverine is as much fun as you can conceivably have at a corporate merger meeting. It’s tedious, yet, occasionally, Ryan Reynolds’s fourth wall-allergic “Merc with a Mouth” will pass a note around the table with a penis drawn on it, and everyone can have a quiet, little chuckle to themselves.
We’ve been gathered here, supposedly, to discuss the integration of 20th Century Fox’s slate of Marvel characters – primarily the X-Men and Fantastic Four, acquired when Disney bought Fox in 2019 – via the long-awaited onscreen reunion of the most irritable guy in superhero cinema history, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and the most irritating guy in superhero cinema history, Reynolds’s Deadpool. Both, in 2009, starred in Fox’s maligned and speedily excised from history X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s not worth dwelling on the memory.
Here, Deadpool is Deadpool no more, with Wade Wilson having hung up the red mask and turned the innuendo down to a low simmer following several abortive attempts to join a legitimate superhero organisation. Nobody wants him, until the TVA wants him – that is, Marvel’s own time cops, first introduced in the Loki series, and here represented by Matthew Macfadyen’s agent Mr Paradox (with enough whiff of Succession’s Tom Wambsgans that it’s a real joy when he calls someone a “drooling boob”). Long story short, Wade’s entire world will be deleted from existence unless he, for plot reasons, can track down a viable Wolverine from somewhere else in the multiverse. Emma Corrin eventually turns up as Professor X’s evil twin and has the most fun they can with limited material.
Reynolds and Jackman, undoubtedly, have extremely likeable odd-couple chemistry. And Reynolds’s Deadpool will work for the people he works for. He’s Captain America for annoying people who think bones being used as nunchucks are funny. Or like action sequences set to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”. Or are easily won over by ugly-but-cute dogs (it’s me, I’m annoying people). Reynolds is as faithful an iteration of the character as we’ll likely ever get, and his presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at least opens up its action sequences to fun, nasty new ways to dispatch extras, even if director Shawn Levy isn’t quite sure how to capture them legibly on film.
But Deadpool & Wolverine has also arrived at entirely the wrong time for the studio, which marched out the back end of Avengers: Endgame preening and self-confident, only to freak out the second its plans to dominate television through Disney+ failed and audiences found 2021’s Eternals a little boring. “You’ve joined at a bit of a low point,” Deadpool tells Wolverine.
Sure, the line’s funny in the moment. But after you’ve heard the fourth or fifth reference to Marvel having no idea what they’re doing (and having already sat through similar jibes about its algorithmic storytelling in Disney+’s She-Hulk), you might start to ask yourself, “Well, instead of all this, could they try to actually figure it out?”
The faux-humility grates after a while, even if it’s puppeteering the ever-irreverent Deadpool as its mouthpiece – and, not to defend Marvel from Marvel, but it feels unnecessarily cruel to use its recent slate as a punching bag while also relying so heavily on a set of ideas borrowed from Loki, one of a handful of recent quality projects that the studio seems to routinely forget about.
Supposedly, Deadpool & Wolverine acts as a farewell and a tribute to the Fox-released Marvel films. But it’s hard, ultimately, to figure out who exactly we’re saying goodbye to, and in what capacity, since Marvel’s approach to the multiverse has been to run around and fling open doors without bothering to close any. Layoffs will occur, the boss has said, but the individuals will be notified at a later date.
There are major cameos here, as expected. And, thankfully, they’re a lot more effective than the random selection offered up in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, mostly because they work as half-decent punchlines. But, because nostalgia has to be treated with deadly seriousness now, they also come with the idea that it’s our moral and civic duty to think back fondly on these characters, as if they’re the sentient playthings of Toy Story, about to be dumped out the back of a truck.
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It’s hard to call this an effective salute to the Fox movies (some of which were very good, some of which were not), when there’s no real sense given of what they collectively achieved beyond existing. The exception, arguably, would be Jackman, who attacks his role again with palpable intensity, all bleeding emotional wounds and dogged self-hatred. And it would work, if this weren’t exactly the same emotional arc already cycled through in what was meant to be the actor’s farewell to Wolverine, 2017’s Logan – a cinematic legacy the film pretends to desecrate while simultaneously cribbing heavily from. To put it in terms Marvel’s executives might understand: Deadpool & Wolverine is a meeting that could have been an email.
Dir: Shawn Levy. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen. 15, 128 mins.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is in cinemas from 25 July