I’d like to see a new cut of this film excised of all the footage of Deadpool and anything Deadpool adjacent. It’s just Hugh Jackman’s sadsack Wolverine given space to tumble into a booze-soaked existential freefall without Groucho Snarx yammering away about BJs and bean-flicking in the background. All of which is to say, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is a mixed (ball) bag indeed, definitely not unendurable, and even boasting a couple of nuggets of misty-eyed nostalgia that aren’t instantly undercut by playground irony, but for the most part it does boast the hit-and-miss qualities of polytechnic sketch comedy.
The set-up is intriguing: a corporate nabob known as Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen) has been given the task of tidying up all the dangling and dead-end timelines in the entire MCU, essentially scooping up the odds and sods of superherodom and coercing them into wrapping things up before he posts them to an arid netherworld known as The Void. While in The Void, these discarded souls come under the power of Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova, telepathic twin of Charles Xavier and happy to be tooling about and causing the good guys a lot of pain by massaging their internal organs.
We hook up with Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson at the point where he’s thrown in the towel of his Deadpool gig and ready to embrace normalcy. Yet when he’s kidnapped by Paradox and told of this industrial-scale cleaning operation, he flits through a portal and solicits the help of Jackman’s Wolverine from a timeline in which he is wallowing into his whiskey glass having made a life-altering error of judgement.
The dye, then, is cast for a Midnight Run à la MCU, with the wisecracker and the rageaholic smooshed together into the confines of a Honda Odyssey all ready to traverse The Void and save their timeline from obliteration. Unfortunately, there’s very little chemistry between the two leads. Their aesthetic, their performance styles, their visions of what this film is, appear to be very different indeed. They share so much screentime together, but never once properly gel.
Of all the Marvel sub-franchises, it’s probably Deadpool that provokes the most extreme reactions on both sides of the aisle, and it’s easy to see why. As a character, there’s always been the sense of a corporate-sponsored rebel, saying just enough to get him put on the naughty step, but not quite enough for a full, dishonourable expulsion.
Even the hardcore haters would likely have to give some elements of this threequel their dues, as the script goes all-in on the metatextual behind-the-scenes dealings relating to the decimation of 20th Century Fox and its various IP holdings. Some of Reynolds’ to-camera asides sound like they were ripped directly from a Variety editorial. Yet despite all the inside baseball funnin’, no-one’s really getting hurt at the end of the day.
The best elements of the film are the things we can’t really talk about, but all I will say is that the film thankfully dials back the designer cynicism when it comes to the question of how to deal with all those superheroes whose stories were lost by the wayside. It’s a move that’s been attempted by countless superhero filmmakers attempting to chase the nostalgia circuit rainbow, but this is the one time where it actually clicks and doesn’t feel like a dismal embarrassment for all involved. And without recourse to AI!
But, y’know, this is another Deadpool film and offers no surprises when it comes to the tone. When you’re watching an artwork that’s actively attempting to out-egregious a Kingsman sequel, then you know you’re on a hiding to nothing. And while it occasionally feels quite revolutionary when it’s directly discussing the dramatic cul-de-sac that is the “multiverse”, it then goes on to drink heartily from that well with diminishing results that we know it is aware of.
Some of the jokes land through sheer volume and force of will, but it feels like you have to endure 40-or-so rectal stabbings for a single juicy zinger. And I would never usually endorse this, but it’s worth sitting for the credits of this one, as there’s an earnestly charming paean to the passion behind the people who make these films – even the shit ones.
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ANTICIPATION.
My intense dislike of the first Deadpool movies making me think that this one can’t possibly be worse. 2
ENJOYMENT.
Scrapes a passing grade by the foreskin of its teeth. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
A hyperactive breakdown of superhero lore which can’t break out of the template it’s so harshly critiquing. 2
Directed by
Shawn Levy
Starring
Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin
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