Connor
Boy how I’ve missed a lot of the MCU as of late.
I can distinctly remember a time when I was seeing almost every movie that came out more or less on release day.
I saw ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ at some point, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ was alright… aaaaand lemme do a quick Wikipedia search… ‘Black Widow’, I saw that one.
Those are the only Marvel movies I’ve seen in this decade. Bloody hell, seventeen-year-old me would never have believed it.
Going into Deadpool & Wolverine, hopefully that means I’m a little more inoculated against the Marvel fatigue that has well and truly set into the modern cultural landscape as these movies start coming and they don’t stop coming.
Deadpool & Wolverine is the thirty-fourth film in the MCU and is hotly anticipated for a couple of reasons beyond the ones I just mentioned.
Deadpool is the poster child for a modern fourth wall demolisher. He shares in-jokes with the audience, talks about studio politics, and will occasionally address a character by the name of the actor playing them. If you aren’t into comics and only consume superhero stuff through movies, there’s really nothing else quite like him (I’m told She-Hulk was similar, but nobody seemed to like it.)
But more importantly, Wolverine is back, and that’s a big deal.
Directed by Shawn Levy, we start with Ryan Reynolds’ eponymous merc-with-a-mouth Deadpool drifting through life without knowing what to do with himself. To his great joy he is pulled from such mundane hell to do superhero shit again, but as you might expect he is dropped right back down again when he is informed his entire universe is about to be destroyed. Apparently, due to some incredibly contrived reasons, Wolverine was single-handedly holding reality together and his death at the end of Logan has made things start to fall apart… somehow. Stop asking questions.
So now he has to find a living Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman finally in the iconic yellow suit, and find a way to save his universe.
So what we have here is a journey of two fundamentally unkillable warriors on a mission, one of whom cannot stop talking to save his life and the other who has anger issues.
As you might imagine, they fight a lot.
And since I mentioned they cannot die, those fights become extremely messy and end up accomplishing not much other than putting more gratuitous violence on the screen and moving the guy who makes fake blood up a tax bracket.
Combine that with universe jumping and Disney money bringing back a few old faces and you have a machine built for hype.
It’s all hype, all the way down.
They even have a moment where Deadpool stumbles onto a faithful recreation of the legendary Uncanny X-Men #251 cover with Wolverine crucified on the X over a field of skulls.
The plot is little more than a vehicle for more hype moments and jokes. It’s loaded with inconsistencies and unexplained phenomena. The entire climax of the film hinges upon a substantial unexplained plot development being handwaved as ‘we’re so awesome’. I can best describe the story beats as ‘stuff happening’ again and again, with fourth wall cuts and quips in between. I watched this with my dad and he claims he lost track of what was going on after the first third of the movie but had fun anyway… which kind of sums up the entire experience really.
It’s a Deadpool and Wolverine movie filled with Deadpool and Wolverine moments.
Every few minutes, a character or situation will be introduced for at least one other existing character to react to, usually by saying ‘Holy Shit’. The plot literally creates an entirely new mechanism for bringing back characters from previous dead end Marvel movies that often pre-date the MCU itself.
Hype, hype… hype. Honestly, it felt less like watching a movie and more like a two-hour TikTok video.
What else… oh yeah, the action. It’s excellent. That’s almost par for the course for a Marvel movie; even the worst ones can reliably be said to have some pretty decent fight scenes, but taking off the kid gloves and letting the characters say ‘fuck’ then successfully impale the guy who can survive such treatment through the head elevates it. Levy had two of the biggest ticket characters of Marvel in his pocket, and by god did he use them to make a glorious, bloody mess.
As for whether I’d recommend Deadpool & Wolverine, that’s the wrong question. If you’ve seen the first two Deadpool movies, then you already know if you are going to enjoy this. Honestly, I feel disingenuous having to even put a review score to it, you will either love it or hate it.
I’ll give it a three out of five, but your mileage may vary.
Year: 2024
Rating: R16
Running Time: 128 MIN
Genre: Action
Director: Shawn Levy
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, Matthew Macfadyen
Production Studio: Marvel | Disney
Distributor: Disney