Deadpool & Wolverine is such a strange beast of a movie that some critics have suggested it may not even be a film at all – which rather begs the question, what exactly is it? An extended satirical comedy skit, like something you’d see on Saturday Night Live, but running more than two hours? A meta-infused, sarcastic diatribe against the entire superhero genre? A buddy movie featuring two middle-aged men in tight costumes who really should know better?
The reality is that Shawn Levy’s film is all of these things, and possibly not a lot more. The Marvel films are by their nature a little throwaway and made-in-the-moment, but this one feels so gossamer-thin that if you remove all the superhero tomfoolery, drug and sex japes, manic fourth wall breaking and endless, often rather pointless cameos, there is really very little left. Audiences from the future looking back at this one in 2045 might wonder exactly how Ryan Reynolds and his team got away with delivering something so flimsy and slight to the door of Marvel president Kevin Feige. And yet it’s an undeniably entertaining romp that will no doubt deliver gazillions in box office greenbacks, just when Disney really needs them.
Whether it’s a movie, art, or anything substantial at all probably isn’t the point. The question here is whether Deadpool & Wolverine can save Marvel by dragging the studio out of its critical slump – is our hero really “Marvel Jesus”? – and whether we really want it to if this is what the next 10 years is going to look like.
What is this (very weird) fresh hell that Marvel has delivered?
Perhaps another way to describe Levy’s film is that it feels like an endless series of mostly impressive set pieces connected only loosely by anything approaching an actual plot. From the opening scenes in which Deadpool stunningly takes down a crew of Time Variance Authority agents using only bits of dead Fox-verse Wolverine’s adamantium-clad skeleton as the opening credits splatter across the screen, this is a film that is big on visuals and shocks tactics – there have been suggestions that all the jokes about gay sex amount to little more than cynical queerbaiting – and rather lacking in traditional Marvel aesthetics such as universe-building and making logical sense.
Even Wolverine’s story arc is pretty much the same as the one we saw in 2017’s Logan, with the emotionally ravaged mutant left looking back in sorrow at a wasted life after all his X-buddies somehow copped it. The approach – sending up everything and taking nothing seriously – is exactly what Deadpool did in his previous, 20th Century Fox movies, so should we really be shocked that the tone is exactly the same in the MCU?
The cameos, the sudden deaths, the multiversal switcheroos
I’ve read some critics suggesting that Deadpool & Wolverine’s cameos were delivered with greater guile than for example, those in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness – would you agree? I found myself unable to work out whether Channing Tatum’s turn as Gambit was intended to be terrible for deliberate comic effect, or if he really did need (as Reynolds suggests in-movie) to get a better dialect coach. Perhaps it was the huge, booming Imax cinema where the screening took place, but I found it impossible to understand what the card-wielding mutant was supposed to be saying.
Fair enough, I suppose, if the aim is just to take the piss. But I rather like Gambit as a character (especially after AJ LoCascio’s bravura turn in the excellent X-Men ‘97) and felt a little bit cheated. The impressive film-making sleight-of-hand as we were introduced to a hero who appeared to be Chris Evans’ Captain America in the Void, only for the person in question to turn out to be Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm, aka The Human Torch, was a palpably clever, brilliant moment. But then they killed him straight off in hyper-gruesome fashion. Oh well.
Why did they bother to bring back Jennifer Garner’s Elektra for all of five minutes? I’m not sure I was too fussed over Wesley Snipes’ brief appearance as Blade either, though at least the arrival of Dafne Keen’s X-23 in the MCU seems to be permanent. What did you think? Are we still supposed to get our fangirl and fanboy knickers in a twist over all this inter-universal shenanigans when it’s apparently all just one big joke?
Cassandra Nova and lots of little Loki-isms
It’s hard to escape the sense that Levy and Reynolds took one look at Loki seasons one and two and decided this was exactly the right kind of material to help them heavily satirise Marvel’s multiversal phase. Emma Corrin does a fine job as Professor X’s evil twin, though quite why she had to introduce herself as such, when Charles Xavier hasn’t even been properly debuted into the main Marvel reality, rather beats me. Those multiple Deadpool variants were briefly amusing, and who couldn’t love Dogpool? Yes, it’s Blake Lively as Lady Deadpool, who else?
A last hurrah for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine?
While you might have thought you saw the last of him in 2017’s Logan, this was another chance to remind ourselves that Hugh Jackman’s curmudgeonly mutant has been one of the finest comic book creations of our times, even while the movies he has starred in have been more up and down than Hulk’s blood pressure at an anger management class. At least Deadpool & Wolverine didn’t take the easy option and kill him off again to pull on our tired and jaded heartstrings one last time.
And yet the existence of this version of Wolverine in the main MCU could end up making it harder rather than easy to bring the rest of the X-Men back. Will Professor X, Cyclops, Beast, Storm, Rogue, Mystique et al all now also have to be ported in from other universes? And what happens if another version of Logan ends up coming with them? This could get confusing.
Is the Marvel Cinematic Universe now forever changed, or just a bit more sweary?
Evans’ cameo was a smartly knowing snicker at the challenges Feige and co will face if they really want Deadpool to one day meet Thor, Hulk and Doctor Strange. Captain America could never appear in an R-rated movie packed with gags about anal sex and Colombian marching powder – this is a guy for whom “son of a bitch” is taking it about as far as he’s prepared to go. So will Deadpool himself have to tone it down when he inevitably turns up in an Avengers movie?
Levy’s film hints heavily that this will probably never happen, so far apart are those films tonally from the world of the Merc with a Mouth. “Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a commercial for another movie,” said Reynolds recently. “It’s just not part of the DNA.” Having seen the film for yourself, do you have a sneaking suspicion that might just be for the best?