Almost 24 years to the day after 20th Century Fox modernized the superhero movie with 2000’s X-Men (while a young Ryan Reynolds starred in a little sitcom called Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place), Deadpool & Wolverine arrives at a different inflection point for the genre. After years of multiverses, IP rights transferring, TV series, and an endless mountain of lifeless, hideous Funko Pops, the genre of big-budget comic book films are in a series of expensive shambles. The DC cinematic universe is in the midst of its second reset, and Marvel’s Phase 5 has been a mess of underwhelming film and television projects – and is now in the middle of a post-Jonathan Majors creative reset. Outside of perhaps Amazon Prime’s The Boys, comic book adaptations, from Ms. Marvel to Blue Beetle to Netflix’s The Sandman adaptation, have mostly run the gamut from stale to impenetrable to laughable (She-Hulk, anyone?). Even the praise for the last well-received Marvel film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, was often couched in the acknowledgement that everybody had run out of creative ideas, and was relying on the flames of nostalgia to keep the machine chugging forward.
Deadpool & Wolverine, the long-awaited semi-sequel to 2016’s Deadpool 2, finds itself existing on the back end of all this, forced to contend with the creative trends of Marvel’s machine, while justifying its presence as something beyond absolute fan service. Admittedly, the approach they took was an unexpected one; rather than act as a red carpet of Disney Marvel cameos to welcome the Merc with a Mouth into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in what is the 34th MCU movie, for anyone counting), Deadpool & Wolverine instead attempts to be a love letter to the a different 18 films in the Marvel oeuvre; the 20th Century Fox-iverse, in all is flawed, indignant, often iconic glory.
In those moments where writers Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Shawn Levy (who returns to direct) allow for a bit of reflection on the two-plus decades of cinema that pioneered the seismic shift in cinema we still feel today, Deadpool & Wolverine almost feels like a film worthy of a $200 million budget (though the fact it’s already made $400+ million at the time of this writing kind of renders that question pointless, ay?). Unfortunately, those moments are too far and few in between; instead, Deadpool & Wolverine spends most of its two hours making flailing attempts at justifying its own existence, even as it openly acknowledges the fact it is embarking on a creatively bankrupt endeavor multiple times throughout the film.
Given Marvel’s recent history, it was no surprise Deadpool & Wolverine is a narrative dumpster fire; what is surprising, however, is how much it dampens the inherent personality and lightness of the first two Deadpool films, with such a blatant disregard to editing and direction. It is noticeable from the first big action sequence of the film, where Deadpool eliminates a group of TVA agents while desecrating the most precious memory of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men universe; every explosive moment of violence or attempt at humor is cut away from, laying bare the artificiality of the scene’s stunts and severely limiting the scene’s ability to do anything but directly pander to millennial audiences (I’ve had enough Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC dance numbers to last a lifetime at this point).
Deadpool has always been heavily edited action, but the first two films at least took a certain visceral pleasure in Deadpool’s creative bits of violence, with a certain reverence for the Merc’s unique combat abilities – here, each action sequence is increasingly lifeless, cutting off limbs and blowing off chunks of flesh with none of the panache of earlier films (though one montage, featuring Deadpool being fitted for his “MCU suit”, is an absolute highlight). Levy’s direction in general is incredibly inconsistent through this film, especially when the film enters the aptly-titled The Void, and the film turns an incoherent gray for an extensive stretch, all which make for an incredibly limited, underwhelming visual palette (both static and dynamic) for the film to work with.
Given that, the introductory sequence is not as great a table-setter as the emerging memes would suggest; from there, Deadpool & Wolverine is mostly an extended dance routine around the reality of its existence. It’s been well-noted Reynolds and his writing team spent more than two years unable to crack a story for a third Deadpool film – instead of push through those struggles to land on an organic idea, they instead chose the cheapest route of least resistance, bringing Jackman back into the fold as a different, more regretful Wolverine, one whose mysterious, dark past left him without the heroic legacy of X-Men 2 and Logan (and in the process, allowing Jackman to tap back into the anger that fueled the more energized performances in the early X-Men films, in what is easily the film’s performative highlight).
But Deadpool & Wolverine can’t even consistently engage with that story – which begins in a surprisingly grounded place, with a rejected, single Wade working at a car dealership before getting pulled into multiversal bullshit. It begins smartly, neatly tying Deadpool’s attempts to find meaning in his life once the stakes have been completely removed by comic book machinations (let’s not forget, he undoes the events of Deadpool 2 in the final ten seconds of that film), which seems a perfect match for Deadpool’s fourth-wall breaking banter to take its game to the next level. But instead of allows itself to exist as a love letter to the X-Universe That Never Was Deadpool and Marvel were leaving behind (including bringing back characters from many of the other X-Men and Fantastic Four 20th Century Fox films we’ve all forgotten about), Deadpool & Wolverine instead gets sucked completely into the soulless, weightless world of Marvel’s multiverse nonsense – an expected and obvious conclusion, but one unsatisfyingly detached from what almost everything that made the first two films work.
Most of the film’s plot revolves around the TVA’s Mr. Paradox (Succession‘s Matthew Macfadyen) and their attempts to snuff out various universes in the multiverse – which, as you might expect, is really just a dude in a suit endlessly dropping exposition in every scene, like a lead weight on any narrative momentum the film tries to build. There are secondary antagonists, of course, but they are mostly CGI-laden distractions to elongate what feels like an extended episode of MCU television through the eyes of the self-proclaimed Marvel Jesus; there are phrases like “anchor beings” and “time rippers” thrown around dramatically, in what make for incredibly flimsy circumstances for just about every plot development through its 127-minute running time. And when it does finally try to ground itself in something emotional, it’s even more disappointing; look no further than the flaccid return of Logan‘s X-23 into the fold, a character Deadpool & Wolverine admonishes Fox for leaving on the sidelines, all while it tries to co-opt the emotional arcs of the much-superior Logan into its own.
As Deadpool & Wolverine makes its way through its increasingly desperate set of coddling, pointless cameos and in-references to former 20th Century Fox products (including one from a oft-forgotten trio of Marvel films, in a reveal that feels is happening about 10 years too late for anyone to notice or care), Deadpool & Wolverine slowly morphs into the exact thing it is trying to parody, oddly justifying the death of its own universe as it notes to us all that yes, Marvel’s pockets are incredibly deep, and because of that, their sense of creative risk or narrative whimsy has been completely lost. Even as purely escapist entertainment, Deadpool & Wolverine, despite its gory, fourth-wall bending exterior, feels like just another cog in the ever-churning machine at this point, less about subversion than service; like No Way Home, every creative decision is the safest one possibly made, until the film loses all sense of itself, relying entirely on existing bits and old identities to try and recapture what’s clearly a lost bit of magic.
There are a few paltry attempts at a larger, potentially more satirical storyline at the heart of this film; but those half-assed moments are lost in the never-ending hamster wheel of mindless exposition and endless ‘deep cut’ cameos. It’s certainly not a film without laughs (especially when Dogpool and Nicepool make their appearances), but for the most part, Deadpool & Wolverine relies so much on the machine consuming it; its personality and ethos lack a sense of wonder, depressingly going through the motions until limping to a loud, inexorably weightless conclusion, sealing its fate not as a definitive last entry of a bygone era, but as another excoriated victim of the one it has been enveloped into.
How about reviewing a movie that you are not going to hate right out of the box because you don’t like the genre in the first place. You are just projecting your clear disdain for something you weren’t going to like. It’s as if you were being forced by your mother to eat your proverbial broccoli and then was allowed to cuss her out for it afterwards for an hour. I find it funny that critics who were going to hate the movie to begin with have the most to say about why they hate it. Kind of like any named villain in the Marvel or DC Universe that likes monologue before they do their dirtiest deed. Kind of like what you have me doing here about your review. Oy Vey!!!