If you’re a fan of the Deadpool character and Ryan Reynolds’ brand of comedy, then this movie is really right up your alley. Because director Shawn Levy and his pool of writers – there are five of them, including Reynolds himself – makes sure there’s a lot of vulgar jokes, sexual innuendos, blood, gore, unnecessary violence, and, of course, the breaking of the fourth wall, meta commentary that the franchise of ‘Deadpool’ has become synonymous with. With the character finally joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Reynolds, Levy, and the rest of the crew could not wait to take shots at their new studio and openly discuss the gravity of it all.
It’s so in-your-face that it feels like the movie’s plot was just hurriedly made up so that they can set up these gags and moments for the meta jokes to come in. I’m really not the audience for this. It feels more like a comedy sketch show than a movie and I don’t have the sense of humor to enjoy a fully choreographed fight scene where Deadpool fights an army of people and making moves that are all sexually coded while dancing to NSYNC’s ‘Bye Bye Bye.’ Yes, we get it, he has a depraved sense of humor. We saw this in the first two movies, what else is there to show?
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ overextends its opening in an exposition-heavy act one, which they try to keep energetic by throwing in as much jokes as they can, to set up a quest for Deadpool to visit alternate timelines to find a Logan, a Wolverine, to save his timeline from fading into nothing. A man from the Time Variant Authority (introduced in the Disney+ show ‘Loki’) called Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) offers him a chance to enter the “sacred timeline” where the Avengers can be found but he would have to let his universe die. In a bid to save the friends he has made in the past two movies, Deadpool takes a machine that allows him to travel dimensions to look for a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who is a being so important it can hold a universe together. Deadpool’s universe is dying because Logan died during the film of the same name, ‘Logan.’ Without him, that universe is set to become nothing.
In the search for a Wolverine, the film manages to showcase Jackman in multiple versions of the character from different eras of the comics. It’s a fan service moment that actually works – because knowing what we know about the MCU – this may be Jackman’s last time to play that character and it’s nice to see him in all the versions; even though Reynolds keeps teasing that the MCU will have him play the character “until he’s 90.”
When Deadpool finally finds a Logan who he can bring him back with him, he is told that the Wolverine that he brought was “the worst one in all the multiverses.” Mr. Paradox then sends both Deadpool and Wolverine into the Void, a place where all variants find themselves before they are reduced into nothing. Deadpool and Logan then face it off in a long battle that plays for the brutality and the gore that one can conjure up between two characters who regenerate instantaneously. After a while, the pointlessness of the match up becomes very apparent. It’s then the film shows the two protagonists that there is a way-out of The Void.
Here is when the film gets interesting. Because The Void is the place where all the unnecessary variants and storylines have come to be erased and the film subverts its own narrative by being a love letter to all the superhero movies that 20th Century Fox made before the Disney acquisition. Act two of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ finds space for certain characters (and the actors who played them) a chance for one last moment before they completely bow out.
This is what highlights what I didn’t like about the film. Because everything that the subverted narrative does is wonderful. The characters that are brought back – and even some that never made it to production – have a chance to remind us of the potential and the promise that each of these characters had when they first showed up in our screens. It’s an emotional hit that is even amplified by the way by which Jackman navigates his character, playing off a version of the character he immortalized, that is lacking in a narrative that he got to play out in different films. When the camera is on Jackman and the storyline, the film feels important, like it has something to say.
But every time it goes to Deadpool, the film has to stop to give him more time to be what he has been for the past two movies. If it’s your humor, great, but it brings nothing to the table and it is just more of the same.
Luckily, Jackman, Macfadyen, and Emma Corrin as Casandra Nova, give the film the gravitas that it needed to sell the emotional point that makes all the jokes worth telling. There are actually more out there but I don’t want to spoil it.
The issue of irreverence is that the film is only irreverent in the way that it makes fun of itself and comic book movies. But it’s never really irreverent in the ways that matter. Deadpool is still a hero – no matter how many times he tries to say that he’s not – and no number of dirty jokes, sexual innuendos, and gratuitous violence will give the Deadpool franchise any real danger or unpredictability. It can only be as irreverent as Deadpool knowing that Ryan Reynolds is playing him. But to really break from formulaic narrative structures, acceptable moral codes, and capitalist inclinations for nostalgia and sentimentality, ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ doesn’t offer much in that department. In fact, the whole franchise never really did.
My Rating:
Deadpool & Wolverine is now showing! Check showtimes and buy tickets here.
