"Deadpool & Wolverine" review — The meta jokes wear thin in Deadpool threequel
“Your little cinematic universe is about to change forever.”
Deadpool & Wolverine opens with Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool bemoaning his character's lengthy absence from the big screen. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever be back,” he says, staring down the barrel of the camera. Despite the immense success of the first two Deadpool films, which have become two of the highest-grossing MPA R-rated films ever produced, there was a time when the future of Deadpool seemed hazy. But now, with one messy corporate merger, a pandemic, and multiple high-level Hollywood strikes later, the “Merc with a Mouth” has received a second lease on life in the greater Marvel Studios fold. Thanks to the fourth-wall-tapping antics of Reynolds’ title character, all of this real-world baggage gets imbued into the film’s very DNA. There is a moment when Deadpool crashes up against the old 20th Century Fox logo half sunk into the ground in the land of “The Void,” a cosmic junkyard at the edge of reality. It’s a rather unsanctimonious, yet maybe deserved, farewell to both the X-Men franchise and the many other Marvel IPs that Fox had previously held, a disparate, disjointed universe coming to a disparate, disjointed end.
Uniting two of the most famous characters from the 20th Century Fox universe of superheroes, Deadpool & Wolverine operates less like a Deadpool 3 and more like a Fox Universe team-up movie with Deadpool as its main lead. Directed by Shawn Levy, who previously worked with Reynolds on Free Guy and The Adam Project, the film operates on a “nothing is sacred” mentality, where the back catalogue of the Fox films is pilfered and desecrated on Deadpool’s bloody katanas. But while it strives to be a clever, irreverent take on the Marvel formula, being part of the Marvel brand ultimately keeps it from anything beyond aspirations. Putting all its chips on Reynolds and Jackman’s chemistry and a slew of surprise supporting characters (they’re not “cameos”) that have varying degrees of effectiveness, there’s a pervasive sense of hollowness to the whole film that gives it a rather sour taste. So soaked in its own self-referential humour, it’s a film more embedded in its real-world lore than in telling a compelling story. Some of it works: Reynolds and Jackman are great together, there are some fun, clever action sequences, and there’s the semblance of an interesting arc waiting for Deadpool.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
It’s been six years since the events of Deadpool 2, which saw Wade Wilson join forces with the time-travelling Cable to defeat a common enemy. Since then, things haven’t been going well for Wade. He failed to get into the X-Men, largely retired the Deadpool persona, broke up with his girlfriend, Vanessa (played by Morena Baccarin), and is stuck working a dead-end retail job at a used car lot. On his birthday, Wade gets a knock at his door from the Time Variance Authority (or TVA, a major focal point of the Loki television series), whose senior agent, Mr. Paradox (played by Matthew Macfadyen), offers him a spot in the sacred timeline, the main continuity of the MCU. See, Deadpool’s universe has lost its “anchor being,” a person whose very existence keeps a given timeline alive. In this case, it’s Wolverine, who passed in James Mangold’s Logan. Here, Wade is given a liferaft off a sinking universe and into a new one. But Deadpool, having adorned himself with the title of “Marvel Jesus” who will be a messiah to his universe, isn’t willing to see his friends and family perish in the collapse of his reality. Instead, he takes a quick punch at Mr. Paradox and launches himself into the multiverse to find a suitable Wolverine replacement.
Deadpool & Wolverine, as the name suggests, lives and dies on the chemistry between Jackman and Reynolds. Thankfully, the film delivers. It’s good to see the two together as Wolverine and Deadpool, a team-up much needed since the disastrous X-Men Origins: Wolverine fifteen years ago. The mostly antagonistic relationship between the two gives the film a consistent tension to coast on. The visceral violence allowed within the bounds of an MPA R-rated film — this being the first MCU movie to receive such a rating — combined with the regenerative healing abilities of Logan and Wade means that the antagonism often turns physical and graphic. The two performances are strong as well. Reynolds effectively plays himself, adding nothing particularly interesting to the character, but does it with enough charm that you’re tempted to forgive him for it. A now 55-year-old Hugh Jackman suits up for his eighth run as Wolverine, finally sporting a yellow-and-blue suit from the comics. Jackman still carries the immortal mutant with great strength, even though this performance is a far cry from the subtly and cleverness of Logan. Unfortunately, most of the film’s characters are not handled nearly as well as these two are, but more on those in a moment.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
Back at the TVA with a replacement Wolverine in tow, Deadpool and Wolverine are kicked out into “The Void,” a vast, grey desert where universes go to die. In a Mad Max-esque turn, they encounter some of the X-Men’s oldest movie foes riding on suped-up vehicles bringing chaos to the landscape. The obvious homage is a little ironic given that this film was released just months after Furiosa, a film that tanked at the box office yet offers mountains more artistic merit than this film could ever hope to conjure. In the Void, our heroes quickly learn that you can either join the army of Cassandra Nova (played by Emma Corrin), a terrifying mutant with reality-altering abilities or become food for Alioth, a primordial entity which consumes all that falls in its way. After barely escaping the clutches of Nova, the two take off into the Void where they cross paths with returning characters like Pyro (Aaron Stanford), Toad (Ray Park), and Sabretooth (Tyler Mane), former members of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Mutants, Jennifer Garner’s Elektra, and Dafne Keen’s X-23, Wolverine’s artificially-cloned daughter from Logan (and those are just the ones I can say without venturing into spoilers).
Despite being released under the Marvel Studios banner and technically existing within the main franchise, Deadpool & Wolverine is decidedly more of a Fox movie than an MCU movie. Being one of the few viable franchises pulled over from the merger, the multiversal narrative gives the film the obligation of being a swansong for an entire generation of Marvel superheroes on the big screen. The film also largely avoids being Deadpool 3, which might frustrate some viewers. Deadpool & Wolverine mostly abandons the plotlines and characters from the previous two films in favour of a new narrative hook. Characters like Colossus, Yukio, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, and Vanessa are all relegated to the sidelines, serving as vague background motivation for Deadpool rather than being characters in their own right. It’s not like the new characters are treated much better either. Emma Corrin is fighting for her life against a script that largely avoids giving her any real motivation. Fans of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men might be quick to identify her as Charles Xavier’s long-lost sister. The film maintains this part of her identity and uses this familial connection to try to justify some antagonism against her brother, but the script never defines the problem nor connects it to the drama actually unfolding.
With five writers credited to its screenplay, there is a distinct feeling of too many cooks in the kitchen, as the story itself feels cliche and underwhelming, made all the more egregious with Deadpool pointing out the fact that it’s cliche and underwhelming. The meta-joking is only partly effective here. It’s fun to see an MCU movie take shots at the franchise. Deadpool referencing the current state of the franchise as a “low point” is refreshing and funny, because it’s so surprising. But at a certain point, the shtick becomes predictable and the jokes lose their effect, which makes the film feel emotionally hollow. The first two Deadpool adventures did a relatively good job of balancing the characters with the comedy, but those lovable, broken people that populated the previous films have been relegated to the film’s opening and closing sections.
Like many of its MCU predecessors, Deadpool & Wolverine continue the franchise’s new obsession with the multiverse, which is how the world of the X-Men and the other Fox characters are now being merged with the mainline MCU. Unfortunately, the film falls into the same traps that have plagued the MCU’s other multiverse-heavy installments, namely Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Namely, it uses the ceaseless special appearances from both returning and new characters (if you’ve seen Doctor Strange 2, you know exactly what to expect here) as a crutch against a narrative propped up on toothpicks. But where Doctor Strange had Sam Raimi’s excellent direction to keep the film going, here we have Shawn Levy, whose film career reeks of half-baked thoughtless drivel, which carries over here.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
There are some highlights to be found in the film to be sure. While this review has often steered into the negative, there are some very enjoyable elements. Like in the other two Deadpool films, there is a come very inventive action choreography and, even, some occasionally creative action cinematography. The film’s opening credits sequence, reminiscent of the opening of the first Deadpool film, finds the ideal balance between gore-y and funny with a little splash of the distasteful for good measure. But these highlights all seem to occur when Levy is least involved when the animators and editors can take the lead. The shift in quality is apparent in a second-act fight scene with Nova’s goons deteriorating to some of the worst camera work I’ve seen in a recent blockbuster. Levy’s not making up for it in how the film feels visually otherwise. The overabundance of CGI and rather dull visual language makes the film feel thoughtless. The film’s best joke is that primarily takes place in a place called “The Void,” which also parallels the absence of personality in the filmmaking of this movie, which is something I cannot say about the previous Deadpool films.
With all the violence, gore, and swearing of an R rating, the film just feels like faux-rebellion in the context of the largest film franchise in history. Deadpool’s on a mission to save the Fox universe from certain doom. While that quest might not be particularly successful, the end product is entertaining enough, if not bereft of life. For all its meta-humour and flirting with the fourth wall, Deadpool & Wolverine is just a Marvel movie, and a flimsy one at that. It’s far from the worst in the series, the bouts of clever humour and the action sequences keep it from that distinction, but the lifelessness of the MCU formula drags this film into the mud. The veneer of a Disney-financed project so carefully tuned for commercial success kills the wannabe anarchist spirit of Deadpool as a character. At the end of the day, this is the movie it was always destined to be: Reynolds pushes the limits of how much we can tolerate before calling something “annoying,” Jackman continues his hard-edged Wolverine into no new direction, the jokes remain frequently cheap, and the nerds will scream when a new character appears on screen. This is a film for the terminally online and not many else.
Deadpool & Wolverine is now playing in theatres.
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