Suck it, Fox, I'm going to Disneyland

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

2024

Directed by Shawn Levy

Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wenick, Zeb Wells, Ryan Reynolds, and Shawn Levy

Spoilers: moderate

It's incumbent on me to admit that I started Deadpool & Wolverine with the worst attitude, not merely expecting to hate it—I still think that was fair—but kind of wanting to, because that would be easier and, you know, it represents everything wrong with contemporary cinema.  I mean, Jesus, it was explicitly sold on representing everything wrong with contemporary cinema, particularly the cinema of the Walt Disney Company.  To varying degrees and at varying points throughout its 129 minutes (a runtime it must believe is actually short, considering that it makes fun of superhero movie runtimes on several occasions), it entirely lives up to that pitch.

Meanwhile, back in July it was received with the kind of bipolar agony and ecstasy that represents everything wrong with contemporary audiences, on one side a bunch of people—not you, I never mean you—inundating the Internet with rapturous five-star takes that made them sound like stupid children, and on the other a smaller cadre of haters who knew they were going to hate it but paid money to see it anyway.  And, sorry, it's clear which group was being dumber there.  So of course it made piles of cash, alongside Inside Out 2 staunching the bleeding at Disney from a year of mediocrities that had, contrary to the company's justified expectations about what their customers wanted, actually tanked; it was, therefore, the first entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe to be a full-on, bona fide hit since its last multiversal crossover film, Spider-Man: No Way Home,* and my assumption was that this would've been exactly like that, the most depressing time I've had in a movie theater in my whole life.  This would also be on top of Deadpool & Wolverine's clear designs to serve as a feature-length imperial triumph for Disney's conquest of 20th Century Fox and an excuse to parade their captured intellectual properties in cages through the streets; and that would be on top of how, by mid-2024, Disney had become so pathetically desperate for anything that would bring their fanboys' dollars back; which is now on top of how, in what ought to be a horrifying turn for any self-respecting American, the Walt Disney Company's general inability over the last four years or so to make good cinema must be weighed as an actual contributing factor in our Goddamned presidential election, insofar as it's helped grease the tubes of a whole film-criticism-to-fascism pipeline.

Even having clips shoved in my face by way of Disney's ads for their streaming service could only hurt it, because you know what's not funny?  Ryan Reynolds's Deadpool, maybe Ryan Reynolds, generally.  Except—come close to me now—we both know he kind of is.  But he's funny in a weird way, as I've mentioned every time I've talked about his Deadpools.  (Though it didn't help that Deadpool & Wolverine promised the continuation of what sure looked like an abysmal star/director team in Reynolds and Shawn Levy, recently of Free Guy.)  Anyway, there's an ad, where Deadpool (Reynolds) meets Nicepool (Reynolds), and they yammer at each other, and, by itself, it's risible, just risible.  But you sit down, you watch Deadpool & Wolverine, and when it arrives an hour in, you've had the time to get on Reynolds's Deadpool's wavelength.  It's not that nothing here would work separated from the rhythm and flow of his patter across those 129 minutes—I assume there's some things, though I'm not sure any of them involve Deadpool as the prime mover of their humor—but Reynolds's Deadpool is funny, if he's funny, in a very cumulative way.  So, at around a half-hour in, the movie just starts clicking.  That scene I found so viscerally obnoxious as a clip?  It clicked, too.  Deadpool & Wolverine might even be the best of the Deadpools at doing that—just desperately pleading for your approval till it becomes cute in spite of your best efforts to revile it.

And so you gotta be intellectually honest, and fair, because that's what's good and right, and admit you had fun.  It's even possible, if we wanted to imagine Reynolds, Levy, and the various other writers here are this smart—I can't quite discount that possibility—that they've cracked their own code, which is why the movie sort of doesn't even start until 35 minutes have passed, those 35 minutes being Reynolds basically just cracking his knuckles a lot and allowing a sea of cold exposition to fill our lungs, whilst Deadpool breaks the fourth wall in ways that feel like they should obviate most of that exposition's necessity.  So: Wade "Deadpool" Wilson, having been turned down from the Avengers (represented by Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan, appropriately representing the Walt Disney Company in its affable soullessness), which doesn't make a lick of sense but let's ignore that, has retired from antiheroing and gotten a workaday job as a car salesman that he's terrible at, and he's also been broken up with by his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, shockingly high up in the credits for somebody with eight lines and no scenes), which I initially thought must've happened in Deadpool 2 but I'd forgot.  Maybe I did, because I still don't care enough to check.  In the middle of a sad birthday party attended by Deadpool's supporting cast, however, arrives a bunch of NPCs—such as we met in a pretty egregious "I bet you're wondering how I got here" prologue, echoing 2016's Deadpool—and they've come to shanghai Deadpool into the multiverse, on behalf of the Time Variance Authority and its evil functionary, Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen).

Maybe you know the TVA from the Disney+ show, Loki; the script assumes you don't, which is why Paradox explains it for what feels like hours, somehow without actually seeming to convey any information that couldn't have been communicated in thirty seconds.  There's a running joke that's already started, incidentally, about how Disney won't let Deadpool have cocaine anymore, and they're unhappy that he's even mentioning it; this is a blind, of course, though it doesn't obscure how obviously Disney forbade them, absolutely, from mentioning Kang, or Jonathan Majors, and it's chickenshit.  There's also the matter of how the TVA is, itself, already something of a metafictional conceit, but in a rather different register than Deadpool's own meta-commentary, and they haven't bothered smoothing that out at all; plus I'll just observe here that despite producing fully four movies or television shows about a time-traveling conqueror and/or his time travel bureaucracy by now, the MCU has not successfully or engagingly used time travel in any of them, because it's not even about successful or engaging time travel, such as was used in Endgame, it's only an excuse to manage IPs on a spreadsheet.

To make these opening longeurs shorter, then—it's another MCU movie that could easily lose a whole half hour, but I legitimately appreciate that the tedious, padded parts of MCU movies are at least now being placed at the beginning, where they do less damage—Deadpool learns his universe is dying, and following some expositional jargon that I'm afraid I understand, even though understanding it is worse than valueless, he concludes that he needs to get his universe a new Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), since his universe's/studio's Wolverine is dead and their continuity will come to an end without him, because he was their "anchor being."  He initially attempts to grave-rob Logan's Wolverine, but this doesn't work; thus, with a stolen TVA gadget, he skips merrily across the multiverse and—I say, only slightly blushing—falls through a series of visually-enjoyable references to various eras and continuities of Wolverine from the comic books, notably his crucifixion by the Reavers which I personally complained about being left out of Logan, so thanks, I guess, Deadpool & Wolverine.  Eventually, Deadpool finds the "worst" Wolverine, blue-and-yellow-clad in his classic uniform, as Deadpool will never tire of pointing out.  He has a TRAGIC BACKSTORY and has CRUMPLED UNDER THE GUILT, and he has no interest in helping Deadpool or doing anything but drinking methanol, so it's his bad luck they get zapped into the TVA's analogue of hell, where explicitly-Mad Maxian shenanigans occur with a bunch of characters Marvel Comics licensed to 20th Century Fox lo so many years ago, chiefly warlord-of-the-wasteland Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), evil twin sister of Professor X and arguably a waste of that villain (indeed, if I recall Morrison's New X-Men correctly, a misstatement of that villain), not least because Corrin is obviously having so much fun being evil and bald.  So we've got an antagonist, and a setting.  Cameos ensue.

This doesn't sound like a real movie because it isn't, and the tragically incomplete self-awareness of Deadpool & Wolverine is that it does not realize this.  It's presumably the reason that it perceives a need to drag itself so miserably through its opening act, when for all that the movie ever accomplishes, or even seems like it's interested in accomplishing, it could've started here to the exact same effect, when Deadpool and Wolverine fall into the trashbin of the multiverse in front of the ruins of the 20th Century Fox logo, refugees from a vanished studio's vanished cinematic universe, now being revitalized and repackaged for their new owners, because this is, after all, what their "movie" is literally about.  (A frequent refrain in those opening minutes has been potshots at Fox and paeans to its purchasers that are recklessly ill-judged from the standpoint of anybody who's not a Disney shareholder: I don't expect Ryan Reynolds or any of the other writers to actually care, but the anti-caring this gets up to, about an event that never would have happened under a competent Justice Department, which cost thousands of people their jobs, is cruel and twisted even for this benighted age.  It's not even "edgy," for its ugliness simply didn't occur to them.  So if you're disgusted at this "celebration" of Fox, solely as a crypt full of nerd bullshit adaptation rights, I am too.)

But at least that's in its ambit.  Deadpool & Wolverine is always worse, and indeed quite terrible, whenever it manages to convince itself it actually is "a real movie": when it's Jackman, a great and gifted actor, being tasked with imposing some measure of "real movie" seriousness onto the proceedings, his red-rimmed eyes and grim scowls are merely inoffensively bland and dull; when it's Reynolds, the unctuousness that's apparently his talent as a comedian is never anything but repulsive when applied to drama, not that Deadpool's "drama" (if I may dip into Reynoldsese, that is, referential humor decades out of date, Deadpool wishes he were a little bit taller, a baller, and had a rabbit in a hat with a bat—also a '64 Impala—in other words, he wishes he "mattered" in a social and, more repulsively still, a metafictional sense) would be any good under any circumstances.

Fortunately, it's aiming for "real movie," with real characterization in the context of a real story, only about 20% of the time, which hurts it badly but we can still do Deadpool & Wolverine the favor of walling it off.  The rest is leagues better, because it does not bother pretending to be a real movie, and just dives headfirst into being stupid and silly and cloying for your affection and (really for the first time) doing "metacinema" as its thoroughgoing purpose, all of it direct and honest in a way that that other 20% isn't, and which No Way Home, which had the nerve to pretend to be a real movie the entire time, never was.  Our remaining 80%, then, is an alternation between a few main modes: rapid-fire Reynoldsian chatter; "look at the thing" comedy (sometimes a subset of "Reynoldsian chatter"); and violent action-comedy.  Let's take the first two in tandem: I've already explained why, despite everything, Reynolds's Deadpool is an eventually-likeable presence; such is the buddy arc of this movie, and Jackman is, correctly, extremely resistant to it.  If the movie only starts 35 minutes in, maybe that's because that's how long it takes for Jackman to arrive in it, and it's because Reynolds is much more enjoyable if we have an on-screen stand-in who, by all the evidence of his performance, despises him and hates being here at all.  (I'm not saying that's necessarily the case, for Jackman is, as noted, great and gifted at playing make-believe; but it could be true.)

It's not always good, maybe not usually, and an astonishing fraction of it—if you estimated "half," I would not accuse you of hyperbole—is entirely just variations on Deadpool sexually harassing men, which I think I've referred to previously as "gay jokes, without malice."  It's the kind of thing that feels more decades-out-of-date than direct references to 90s/00s pop culture, the sort of thing that would be amazingly bold if it had actually happened in a 90s blockbuster (bordering on Rocky Horror Picture Show levels of gay pestering, albeit wholly unerotic), and in a 20s movie is still kind of bold, in other ways, but starts to be slightly wearisome, since if you want to talk "chickenshit," I think it's hard not to eventually want the movie to either put up or shut up.  (He doesn't even play Ladypool, the coward.)  Still by-and-large funny, though, even if not-even-halfway through it starts prompting questions of why (or how) the "emotional core" (scarequotes the size of Olympus Mons) of the movie is supposed to be Deadpool's chick.  Yet this and other things do establish that while almost all of the Deadpools' "lack of filter" is a pretense, Reynolds is at least willing to batter at that filter, and a little bit of danger gets through.  (The other half of Deadpool's prattling, at least that isn't elaborate juvenile insults, is making fun of the MCU's faltering reputation; it does have a "cake and eat it too" quality, but it lands some cogent criticisms amidst the slurry.)  The "look at the thiiiing" humor, on the other hand, is surprisingly well-constructed: I don't like admitting that "cameoing actors" can still thrill me in a superhero movie, but fuck if I wasn't sometimes thrilled anyway; Chris Evans's participation is actually clever; and the face that finds his way in amongst a collection of Fox characters who weren't even in X-Men movies made me very happy, because it's not even just a "hey, fanboy" reference, it's a solid reel of dialect comedy doubling as a vicious mockery of Chris Claremont's writing tics (even trebling as a gentle mockery of that actor's weird obsession with playing such a goofy, unaccountably-fan-favorite character).

The action-comedy is at least as much of a surprise, as being "remotely good" under Levy's direction would be some kind of surprise, and I'll give it to him: this is pretty strong.  It probably helps an MCU movie to have some of its PG-13 guardrails widened, though this is rated R because they say "cunt" and "retarded" once apiece and "fuck" four thousand times, and there's only a little violence that you might even theoretically wince at.  Most of it's the functional equivalent of a Mortal Kombat uppercut (not even a Mortal Kombat fatality), just CGI blood spouting every which way and often from no recognizable wound.  But that's only a little criticism: it's reasonably well-edited and it features some nicely iconic imagery, like Wolverine's shadow paired with the snikty-snikty sound editing, and a very successful climactic scene that I'd hate to describe, more because it sounds wretched than because it would spoil it, which takes on a side-scrolling beat-'em-up aesthetic and feels like an apology from Levy for his action movie that actually was about video games.  As for how the movie overall looks, Levy and cinematographer George Richmond have responded to the criticisms about MCU cinematography by just throwing up their hands and saying "well, fine then, here's the log files, you color grade it," but at this point in the artform's decline we have to recognize there are many ways for cinematography to be terrible, and this isn't the worst one.

As for how it moves, well, that's in fits and starts, but in ways you're not bound to care about, what with it not really mattering if it tells a story in the first place.  (There's a comedic life-and-death struggle between our immortal deuteragonists inside what I guess is pseudo-sarcastic product placement that lasts what the movie insists is an afternoon, and Levy manages a kind of artful time compression, like a talented director and everything; on the other hand, there's some cutting during the climax that appears to indicate that Cassandra has spent the last twenty minutes descending a small flight of stairs.)  And so I suppose that doesn't sound too appreciative, but lots of comedies are just lumpy collections of things their makers thought were funny or cool.  This one features pop music needle-drops so fucking braindead in their "irony?" (even "Like a Prayer," which, mechanically-speaking, it uses strikingly well) that it almost registers as satirizing James Gunn, but "satire" is one hell of a perilous claim to make in this context; it's excited beyond all measurement that maybe Hugh Jackman could be, would be Wolverine again, in the proper MCU.  That's still gross, and this movie is not so different from the likes of fucking Space Jam: A New Legacy.  Accordingly, it's slop.  But I'll give it this: it's human slop, a disorganized bag of junk that Reynolds, Levy, and the rest clearly earnestly enjoy, and if it's off-putting and annoying that they'd like to dump that bag out on your coffee table and explain its contents to you in detail while making dumb jokes, it's kind of charming, too.

Score: 7/10

*Yeah, Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness, but that wasn't meta and it was pearls before swine for you people, anyway.  It's also not totally dissimilar to She-Hulk, only Deadpool & Wolverine wasn't made by space aliens trying to reverse engineer a terrestrial sitcom.