'Deadpool & Wolverine' briefing

2 ½ (out of 4)

            Deadpool 2 began with a simple “FUCK WOLVERINE” and things aren’t too different now… if you’re coming into the latest Deadpool flick for the clawed curmudgeon you may as well stick to The Wolverine, hell the only Huge Act Man X-Men movie worse than Deadpool & Wolverine is obviously X-Men Origins: Wolverine (a deservedly scorned spin-off with admittedly decent choreography if awful VFX), no bar to exceed considering Wade and Logan play odd couple for about four minutes together onscreen. As technically the first X-Men movie in the MCU, you can’t be too mad at it when there’s a dozen Easter baskets worth of stupid comic-nerd nuggets — for that specific cameo that’ll make you chuckle (for me it was rescuing Channing Tatum’s Gambit movie from the empty sea of developed and unrealized movies) this flick is like an upended cereal box.

Akin to Spider-Man: No Way Home’s playfully unconcerned Multiverse-mucking, D&W has just as little actual story and likewise feels like a pure product rather than a real movie. However, even when 40% of the jokes are falling flat, Ryan Reynolds’ steadfast creative commitment ignites the third Deadpool with at least some marginal sense of unequivocal uniqueness, which is more appetizing than James Gunn’s own irksome irreverence, although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 may be the only good Marvel movie out of their last seven or so. Deadpool & Wolverine may be a whopper of pound for pound entertainment value — it’s still hard to genuinely say it’s good.

Wolverine is almost more sidelined than Godzilla in that last Kong mash-up, here though I understand more since it’s Deadpool’s unlikely franchise at the end of the day. Because the first film has terrible non-linear narrative structure with a pretty unsatisfying outline of an origin and a quickly outdated sense of what meta means, I think the third is just too double-stuffed with fun not to be superior, even if both are too insanely specific products of their cultural place to age gracefully. Deadpool 2 is the actual movie in the franchise, the bona fide blockbuster, the most seamless mix of impressive action sequences (David Leitch in the driver’s seat helps), crisper self-aware commentary, more effectively base humor and pinch of actual characterization. This movie still has the sword-swinging slapstick in effective bouts between our titular foul-mouthed, virtually unkillable mental cases, and you can’t help but laugh at some of Reynolds’ ridiculous wisecracks (or Hugh giving what he’d give Shakespeare) — next to the way this Cinematic Universe has insisted on one-liners and tension-eviscerating asides, Ryan relatively feels like a comic savant since too much of Whedon, Gunn and the new Spidey shtick has rubbed me wrong.

The real victory is this is an authentic Deadpool movie — despite the way Fantastic Four and of course the rest of the X-Men are starting to seep into the cracks of the GRAND TIMELINE or whatever, you don’t even blink at the first R-rated Disney/Marvel flick by a LONG SHOT (the closest was a weak F-Bomb in Guardians 3), or wait around for MCU cameos when they could bring back Pyro, Toad, Juggernaut, Laura/X23, Tatum to finally play Gambit for Christ’s sake and throw in Wesley Snipes and Jennifer Garner as Blade and Elektra for respective good measure, needless as they are, then of course there’s Chris Evans’ sneaky cameo as Johnny Storm rather than Steve Rodgers, a crappy recurring joke turned a solid one. But what matters is that this actor/character switcheroo ties in COMPLETELY to the Comic Con craziness occurring just as this movie easily has the biggest opening weekend of 2024 — if Chris Evans can be both Captain and the Torch in our universe, than Downey Jr. can be BOTH IRON MAN AND DR. DOOM! FUCK IT FEIGE! Yes let us all forget the Kang fiasco which would have been shit even if Jonathan Majors hadn’t become a problem child and everything went according to “plan.” Fantastic Four now has the subtitle First Steps (what like they’re Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2?) because if Phase Four or Five will be remembered, if at all, it’s whiffed one-offs and really paltry, poorly considered attempts to slam the reset button on the MCU’s stalled out, inevitable entropy.

The movie mourns the death of Fox in that evil manipulative arrangement of sentimental behind the scenes footage of better superhero movies Disney had no hand in — they’re flaunting and flexing their not so recently acquired IP harder than ever and this is just the start. I’m just so happy that by sheer financial calculus Feige has to bend over and take Reynold’s quips about Deadpool & Wolverine arriving at a “low point” in the series. That’s no joke though as the last one, The Marvels, in money or moviemaking, is just shit, worst ever for the brand, and even if this movie’s self-awareness about the drop-off since Endgame is a distraction of insincere “honesty,” it’s just delightful to witness onscreen. Fortunately Reynolds is just as inseparable from his character as Jackman form Logan or Downey from Tony… plus there’s that rando Peter (Rob Delaney), the elderly blind roommate (Leslie Uggams) and all the glib, giddy decisions making this a weirdly lovable trilogy contrary to the smarmy swill the first movie suggests on its own.

D&W has reasonable respect for Logan (less for Logan, who is a different animal than we’ve seen before with the same grimaced redemption arc) and yet this second swan song, this meme-able encore (DID WE MENTION HE’S WEARING THE CLASSIC YELLOW SUIT OMG FINALLYYY) is just more gore and mockery and dumb needle drops — I almost don’t even need to mention director (and first-time writer, alongside four others, after twenty-five years of mediocrity exclusively behind the camera) Shawn Levy, most famous for the stinky Night at the Museum trilogy, one-off unfunny Steve Martin vehicles like Cheaper by the Dozen and the 2006 Pink Panther plus crappy crass but still sentimental comedies This Is Where I Leave You and The Internship. His latest era may be his best, as this is his third charming enough/“eh not bad” Reynolds collab in a row, rearing 2021’s late summer sleeper hit Free Guy and the sci-fi coming-of-age Netflick The Adam Project — which family friendly movie with a slavish religiosity toward Star Wars, 80s nostalgia and all forms of mainstream nerd culture would you prefer? Anyway, like Tim Miller directing 2016's Deadpool, there’s really no voice to make out here, and Levy is so tasteless you can’t even lament another director getting tangled up in the Disney turbines.

With eight months after the embarrassment of The Marvels and eight months until Captain America: Brave New World (probably not the first on anybody’s anticipated list) this is a desert stretch for MCU disciples. Then we figure out what’s going on with that asterisk Thunderbolts*'s title before Fantastic Four seemingly directs us to two new Avengers only just subtitled Doomsday for obvious RDJ-related reasons and the unchanged Secret Wars in 2026. As someone totally finished with actually expecting ANYTHING of significance to happen (2020s MCU really is the true TV-identical serialization of cinema) I’m glad Deadpool & Wolverine took the tiresome, messy malarkey of cinematic interconnectivity to more pleasingly flippant and freewheeling places than Doctor Strange in the Mulitverse of Madness or any other failed attempt to widen this Universe’s reach since 2019.