‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Review: Movies, Now Less Than Ever!

If ever there was a movie “for the fans,” it’s Deadpool & Wolverine, which requires an elevated level of Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom and/or business operations to fully appreciate. Many viewers will surely be clueless to moments that make certain members of the audience guffaw. What the film says about fandom, though, is a little distressing. Simply liking something isn’t a thing anymore. Somewhere around the announcement that Spider-Man would be joining the MCU, the terms of which required hammering out the rights details with Sony, being a fan morphed into being an armchair CEO. The “what-ifs” of the world of mergers and acquisitions were talked about as much as, if not more than, the movies themselves. When it was announced that the Walt Disney Company would be acquiring 20th Century Fox in 2017, Marvel blogs were talking about the merger as much as The Wall Street Journal. What for the larger world of film production meant a troubling shrinking and consolidation of the studio system had fans abuzz, dream-casting the IP collaborations they weren’t sure would ever be possible. The Silver Surfer could fight Thanos! The Fantastic 4 could now have a cappuccino with Captain America! The possibilities were endless!

One of the characters that moved over to the Mouse House was Deadpool (played by Ryan Reynolds, whose entire personality seems to have blended with his most iconic character), whose R-rated antics seemed antithetical to the sterile, sexless kingdom the MCU had built. However, Marvel overlord Kevin Feige saw an opportunity for Deadpool to provide a jolt of energy to the new phase of the MCU, which, for the first time, was in an extended lull of fan enthusiasm. Fox had produced a pair of wildly successful Deadpool films before the Disney merger had been finalized and Feige & Co. decided to flex the MCU’s newly-acquired IP might by pairing Deadpool with the most cinematically-iconic superhero they gained the rights to in their corporate chess game: Wolverine.

Hugh Jackman, a fine actor with many wonderful performances under his belt, will always be synonymous with Wolverine, who helped launch the superhero genre in 2000 with the release of X-Men. A relative unknown at the time, Jackman would go on to become one of the biggest movie stars in the world, putting his retractable Wolverine claws back on time and time again (this is Jackman’s ninth appearance as Wolverine over the course of 23 years, which is more than the number of Bond films that Roger Moore appeared in and a longer tenure than Vin Diesel has had as the leader of the Fast and Furious franchise). It all reeks of corporate desperation, but what Deadpool allows Disney to do is acknowledge that desperation, and they do so with a fairly deft hand..

Deadpool & Wolverine brings its two titular heroes into the MCU with Deadpool’s trademarked, sardonic meta-humor. The convoluted plot involves the same multiversal antics that have bogged down the MCU for years, lowering stakes and giving the storytellers permission to retcon anything that the fans don’t take kindly to. Deadpool & Wolverine exists in a reality where the story of James Mangold’s Logan, an earnest, po-faced tale of Wolverine’s regrets and redemption, and the relentlessly sarcastic Deadpool have both happened, even if they occurred in different multiverses. Director Shawn Levy, who Ryan Reynolds seems to now have on retainer after working on Levy’s last three projects, manages to pull off a delicate balancing act, as Wolverine and Deadpool still feel like the characters audiences have come to know without operating like oil and water. Deadpool (literally) pulling Wolverine into his world kills two birds with one stone: it gives Deadpool a greater sense of pathos than he has ever had on screen and it allows Hugh Jackman to be funnier than he has ever been as Logan. Once Deadpool and Logan have teamed up, they are confronted by a multiversal bureaucrat (Matthew Macfadyen) and banished to another multiverse where they encounter a big bad (who shall remain nameless) from another multiverse, played by Emma Corrin, who brings a welcome gravity to the proceedings. The central conflict of the film involves multiversal destruction but, fortunately, never feels tedious because it keeps the characters front-and-center. Deadpool wants to save the world not to save faceless people we are unfamiliar with, but to save his friends and the woman he loves.

Make no mistake, though, Deadpool and Wolverine is a comedy first; a vulgar, R-rated, often juvenile comedy that provides an abundance of laughs, if for no other reason than it throws out more jokes than any other movie this year. Even if the hit rate is only about 75% (there are several attempts at cancel culture jokes that are about as funny as a bad breakup), the raw number of laughs is up there with some of the more successful comedies of the last few years. For the first 90 minutes, the film feels as much like an Austin Powers movie as it does an active cog in the MCU machine; this is, perhaps, damning praise and is representative of the borderline-anti-art implications of Deadpool and Wolverine. Like Mike Myers’ spy spoofs, the latest entry in the MCU is funny on its own terms, but there are deep-seated layers of comedy if you know the references to the things being spoofed. In Austin Powers, those things are art, itself: Bond films, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Rat Pack vanity projects, to name a few. In Deadpool and Wolverine, the jokes are largely about the invisible hand that is trying to convince the viewers that they like something. The puppetmaster has manifested itself in the art, playfully (and, to be clear, funnily) trying to convince them that the corporate monolith is on their side. There are cameos, some of them genuinely exciting and surprising, that nod not just to the history of Marvel, but also to the development process. It is as if the abstract of the MCU morphs into a ticker symbol on screen with audience goodwill acting as a surrogate for a stock price. There becomes a sense that Deadpool & Wolverine is more interested in Disney synergistics than artistic merit.

It brings to mind the farcical slogan of the movie studio in Robert Altman’s The Player: “Movies, now more than ever!” Not only is the film trying to get the audience on its side, it is trying to signal that the way these movies make them feel is important; that the films, themselves, are important. The successful jabbing turns into a snake eating its own self-parodic tail, the destruction of that element giving birth to something entirely different and far more troubling.

In a vacuum, though, the more emotional beats are somewhat successful. However nefariously it may be accomplishing them, the more sentimental moments of the film are affecting without feeling out-of-touch with the rest of the movie. For the first time, Deadpool has a degree of pathos. As the laugh-a-minute snark of Deadpool eventually gives way to Shawn Levy’s saccharine sensibilities (which are thankfully tamped down by Deadpool’s very nature) displayed in films like The Adam Project and The Internship, there is some true tugging of the heartstrings. During the film’s climactic moment, an ironic “Like a Prayer” needle drop slowly morphs into a choral cover that cleverly transforms the moment into pure catharsis. Levy’s storytelling instincts and eye for action have, perhaps, never been better. In a film full of low-stakes fight scenes (there is zero tension in a scene where Deadpool is fighting Wolverine), at least those scenes are fun to watch and have more visual flair than we have become accustomed to in the MCU’s recent entries.

Deadpool & Wolverine mostly avoids the pitfalls of world-building and tedious, large-scale set pieces, instead operating as a cynical olive branch to the viewer. It’s course-corrective subtext made text. That self-referential quality is built into the DNA of any Deadpool project, to some extent, and Reynolds and Jackman really do sell it with a particular verve and enthusiasm, but this lingering, nefarious force bubbles under the whole endeavor. In the moment, Deadpool & Wolverine is a satisfying comedy with a surprising emotional core. What it means for art is an entirely different story. “We know we messed up, and we’re sorry,’ the movie whispered to me as my monkey brain squeezed out a steady stream of endorphins. Deadpool and Wolverine’s meta-textual obsession ends as a tale of the emperor having no clothes, even if Marvel’s reign appears to be back on the right track.

Grade: C+

20th Century Studios and Marvel Studios will release Deadpool & Wolverine only in theaters on July 26.