The Marvel Cinematic Universe enjoyed a “comeback” this year with Deadpool and Wolverine (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). The hotly anticipated sequel-slash-teamup resurrected Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and put him next to Ryan Reynolds’ wisecracking, fourth-wall-disrespecting antihero Deadpool for a relentlessly pottymouthed and violent R-rated adventure, grossing $1.3 billion at the worldwide box office. Not too shabby, if you’re a bean counter. The movie signals a righting of the ship for the MCU, which flopsweatted its way through The Marvels and a crummy Ant-Man sequel (not to mention far too many shrugworthy Disney+ series) and really needed a hit. Well, they got one. But is it as big a success creatively as it is commercially? The jury on that will reconvene by the end of this page.
The Gist: This plot. Oy. I give not a single iota of a shit about it. Any hope that D&W might actually stand on its own two feet narratively ended up demolished down to its composite subatomic particles. Which is to say, if you want to follow it and understand it contextually with any level of detail, you have to have read mountains of comics; watched many of the very bad non-MCU Marvel movies (and a few of the better ones, like Logan) and a bunch of the legit MCU movies, and two seasons of Loki; understood Ryan Reynolds’ film and television repertoire and some of the details of his off-screen personal life; and consumed internet memes like a baleen whale to schools of krill. And yes, there’s timeline hopping here too, as in alternate universes, just to give it an extra layer of convolution – and depending on your interpretation, that might also include our own existence on this side of the screen, since Deadpool likes to talk right at us a lot, and dance for us too. To say this movie is A Bit Much does not do justice to the snarky capitalization of phrases that are not normally capitalized.
Anyhow. These days, Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool (Reynolds), is a used car salesman with a stapled-on toupee. His Deadpooling days are behind him, although he also dreams of someday being an Avenger, which he points out is possible now that Disney owns both Marvel and Fox. But the Avengers don’t want this low-rent not-quite-a-hero, possibly because he swears a lot and kills people without much of a second thought. He’s motivated to make something more of himself in order to win back his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), who was dead but isn’t anymore thanks to comic book plots (read: time travel). Deadpool is then snatched by the Time Variance Authority, thus launching the multiverse portion of this story, which is so convoluted that no amount of overexplaining will make it make sense unless you get out your slide rules and graphing calculators.
I do have an out for my lack of caring about comprehending this plot, since any attempt to get into it may verge on spoiler territory. So I’ll just reveal that there’s a guy named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) who works for the Time Variance Authority, and might not be pure of motive. And then I’ll jump to the part where Deadpool traipses across space-time to find a non-dead Wolverine (Jackman) so they can beat the piss out of each other, and then beat the piss out of some villains. They end up in The Void, a kind of purgatorial timeline lorded over by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the long-lost twin sister of Wolverine’s mutant mentor Charles Xavier. The realm is home to 300 star-actor and obscure-Marvel-character cameos of varying fame and duration, as well as multiple versions of Deadpool. Meanwhile, Wolverine is sad. He’s the worst Wolverine ever out of all the Wolverines in all the timelines. Will he ever be happy again? Can Deadpool help him be happy? Fanpeople will care about this, or at least pretend to care about this. They have nostalgia zones to tend to, you know – they gotta be watered and seeded and weeded like a garden.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: D&W is fairly singular in its wiseassedness and ability to not give a single f— about anything. I haven’t felt this overwhelmed since Everything Everywhere All at Once, and the self-referential stuff is part Monty Python, part Ferris Bueller. But more to the point, visually speaking, it’s so very much an MCU movie like the many that came before it. Take that as you will.
Performance Worth Watching: Meryl Streep totally walks away with the film in her cameo. No! That’s a lie! But it isn’t wholly unbelievable, is it? To address this seriously, though – Jackman’s super-duper-extra-self-loathing take on Wolverine clashes with the flippant Deadpool tone, but the actor’s ability to almost make us feel invested in the character’s well-being and deliver slashy-slashy one-liners shows some impressive range.
Memorable Dialogue: Classic Deadpool: “There are 206 bones in the human body – 207 if I’m watching Gossip Girl.”
Sex and Skin: None. Gotta watch the other Deadpools for that.
Our Take: I will say this: I very much enjoyed the Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote reference. It’s subtle, but it’s there. The jokes are consistently good, the fights are just fine and the story is stinking garbage structured like a superglue-drenched Eldredge knot that isn’t worth untying unless your decades of Marvel superfandom has granted you the power to do so. I laughed a lot, though, even occasionally during the parts where characters succumb to dense expositionism, because they explain and explain and explain things until it’s almost funny, or they comment on how stultifying their nigh-endless explaining is.
My indifference for D&W does teeter toward endearment, because if you cease caring whether you keep up with this nonsense and just let the jokes come, it’s a good enough time. Laughs are big and laughs are small, but laughs are laughs and always better than no laughs, especially when laughs are intended. Irreverence is deployed with the thoroughness of an atomic bomb – not a surprise, considering the previous Deadpools established the tone, and a formula that demands totally hilarious use of music by the likes of Goo Goo Dolls, NSYNC and the Grease soundtrack. The films are less successful when they try to entice us to feel an emotion outside the brief elation one feels when a brutally inappropriate one-liner or visual gag lands like a George Foreman roundhouse. As for our investment in the characters’ inner lives? That depends on whether you’re one of those people who sheds tears when Wolverine finally dons his mask in a movie. I’m not one of those people.
Our Call: This is a good enough movie. Its place in and influence on the MCU is a level of analysis I have no energy to explore, as this franchise has sapped too much of my enthusiasm and energy by now. But I’ve seen Deadpool and Wolverine twice, and as fun as it can be, repeat viewing results in diminishing returns since all the surprises are no longer that, by definition. So STREAM IT, but its rewatchability is suspect.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
