Deadpool & Wolverine

After over a year of speculation, a bunch of cameos have been revealed in the past few days. It's pretty impressive how many they succeeded at keeping under wraps. To preserve the joy of discovery, I avoid specifics below. You can find them all over the internet if you're curious, such as here.

Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) wasn't supposed to be here.

Despite its development long preceding the launch of the MCU, that first movie felt like a reaction to the staggering success of the series. Superhero movies and other PG-13 franchise fare were making up a bigger portion of the box office and taking up more of the public's attention, setting the stage to take the piss out of the already well-established tropes. Twentieth Century Fox was always seen as scrappier, angrier, and more crude than their fellow studios, and the financial success of their X-Men movies paled in comparison to that of the MCU, where making half a billion dollars was the floor. As such, they had more flexibility to make fun of the genre, as they wouldn't be undermining their own cash cow. Of course, it was a huge hit, ending up one of their highest grossing films, period.

When Disney bought Fox in 2019, Deadpool was left in a strange place. Obviously, his trashing of their golden goose didn't make a dent in the business, but companies don't tend to like making fun of their own customers. Moreover, it was unclear how he'd fit into the MCU milieu. Contrasting their squeaky clean presentation, both Deadpool movies are full of profanity, drug use, graphic (and creative) violence, sex, and jokes in bad taste. That this movie exists at all is a minor miracle despite the six year wait, even more so given it retained its R-rating, becoming the first MCU movie to do so.

That being said, the fingers of Feige are all over this thing.

Instead of constant, irreverent, bawdy jokes, we get tragic backstories. Instead of the elevation of C- or D-list mutants to the main cast to keep budgets under control, we get notable (if small) roles from five Fox superheroes, and a number of other smaller cameos. Instead of sharp jabs at the shape and style of superhero movies, we get some limp, reheated internet observations about "Can't we cool it with this multiverse thing?" There are long stretches without a single attempted joke: not bad jokes, as that's a matter of taste, but parts which are meant to be taken seriously. Even bits which feel like they might be meta-jokes, like Wade earnestly talking about wanting to be an Avenger, prove to be actual plot points as they return to them repeatedly. The stakes are incredibly elevated, too: whereas the first two are personal stories which happen to involve super-powered beings, this one involves the fate of the timeline.

Which could almost be a commentary in and of itself, about the bloat of the modern superhero blockbuster. The inclusion of nothing characters from the shows and movies for no reason, the quoting of scenes and imagery from previous Deadpool entries, the appearance of the Deadpool Corps reminiscent of the Spider-People in Across the Spider-Verse or even the Citadel of Ricks from Rick & Morty. All of which highlights the absurd scope of many mainstream superhero stories, expanding into almost self-parody. And then...they don't do anything with that. Sure, the Deadpool Corps are sidelined in a somewhat entertaining way that feels designed to prevent them from showing up in the future. But that's it. At some point, ironically doing something becomes indistinguishable from just doing the thing, and Deadpool & Wolverine blows right past that point.

The fundamental issue is its refusal to commit to anything. In every dichotomy, it wants to have it both ways. Take the superhero cameos. Few of Fox's entries in the genre were considered particularly good (regardless of box office performance), so of course most of the characters come from bad films. That, plus opening on Deadpool digging up Logan's grave (restaged from the end of Logan) and using his skeleton to fight off a hoard of TVA agents, is spitting in the face of audience members who lean heavily on nostalgia, eagerly awaiting references to their favorite characters or movies and ignoring the context around them. Which has an extra layer of (obviously intentional) irony, since that's such a big part of Deadpool's whole thing. At the same time, the movie is also trying to be a send-off for those same characters, giving them some bad-ass fight scenes and allowing them a few pot shots at superhero movies since. There's a wistfulness as Deadpool and Logan (Hugh Jackman, of course) find themselves in a wasteland with a mostly buried Twentieth Century Fox statue. The fear of alienating part of the audience means we're left feeling hollow, as trying to have it both ways results in having it neither.

The style of humor survives mostly in tact, although it no longer feels as fresh or as daring as it did eight years ago. Certainly, being signed off on by the House of Mouse makes it feel even less edgy. Some of it is the pacing: as mentioned above, there are some long stretches without an attempted joke, and shorter stretches bridged by weak gags which didn't elicit a single audible laugh from anyone in my crowded theater. Which isn't to say the movie isn't funny. It often leans on what the previous two installments established (boner jokes, drug humor, creative cursing), and does get off a number of great fresh jokes. Although it more often succeeds at the obvious, clever ones which you can see coming a mile away, giving you a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine when you get there before the movie does.

I've barely touched on the plot because it hardly matters, especially relative to how convoluted it is. It's rife with exposition, but not anywhere near enough to make the joke land. Even more, there are strong indications from early on that its stakes for the MCU are pretty small. The TVA will excise the Earth-10005 timeline, and Deadpool can make the jump to Earth-616, where the Avengers are. Plus, there are a number of jokes implying this is to be viewed as his "audition". So when the stakes of the movie expand for the third act, it's hard to feel like they have any grander implications than before.

All of that being said, there are two intensely bright spots I want to call out. For one, all the cameos are handled quite well, but the first major cameo is perfection. It manages to be more than simply "Look who it is!", subverting your expectations of the character and their importance. But the key one is the writing for Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman's performance of it. As implied before, the Logan we know from the movies (and from Earth-10005) is dead, so Wade recruits this one from some unnamed timeline. A tragic backstory renders him meaner, angrier, more bitter, and generally more aggro. For the entire runtime, you never once feel like you're watching the old Logan. This guy is a bastard through and through, not the hero we're familiar with. He never pretends otherwise, and Jackman captures that perfectly. The gleam in his eye whenever he has a chance to engage in violence is wonderful, and his deployment of sarcasm is markedly different from Wade's snark.

Oh, and I should find a spot to mention that the Void being a riff on Furiosa, complete with a Dementus clone whose chariot is pulled by four motorcycles, is pretty sweet. For one, because the imagery from the world of Mad Max will always be awesome. But mostly because it demonstrated an excellent use of the release calendar and desire to adapt, especially given that its initial release date was before Furiosa, which would have rendered these jokes baffling.

Ultimately, its biggest failing is how much it shaped itself to the MCU, despite its success all coming from being counterprogramming to it. In many ways, Deadpool & Wolverine lands more as fan-fiction than a Deadpool movie. Sure, we only had two prior entries to determine what a "Deadpool movie" even is. But when you begin your film by forgoing a tradition as delightful as using the opening credits for a series of gags and meta-commentary and in-jokes, you're already signalling to the audience that things have changed. To be clear, there are a few fun gags in the end credits: Gordon Reynolds makes an appearance, and keep an eye on the Special Thanks section for a goofy little callback. That's just it: they pushed aside the previous bits of vivacity in the film in order to make it more like a "normal" movie. And the superhero landscape is poorer for it.