When Fox Studios released the first Deadpool movie back in 2016, it played like an irreverently funny antidote to our collective comic-book-movie fatigue. Wade Wilson, or Deadpool, was a foul-mouthed mercenary who obliterated his enemies and the fourth wall with the same gonzo energy.
Again and again, Deadpool turned to the camera and mocked the clichés of the superhero movie with such deadpan wit, you almost forgot you were watching a superhero movie. And Ryan Reynolds, Hollywood’s snarkiest leading man, might have been engineered in a lab to play this vulgar vigilante. I liked the movie well enough, though one was plenty; by the time Deadpool 2 rolled around in 2018, all that self-aware humor had started to seem awfully self-satisfied.
Now we have a third movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, which came about through some recent movie-industry machinations. When Disney bought Fox a few years ago, Deadpool, along with other mutant characters from the X-Men series, officially joined the franchise juggernaut known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
That puts the new movie in an almost interesting bind. It tries to poke fun at its tortured corporate parentage; one of the first things Deadpool says is “Marvel’s so stupid.” But now the movie also has to fit into the narrative parameters of the MCU. It tries to have it both ways: brand extension disguised as a satire of brand extension.
It’s also an odd-couple comedy, pairing Deadpool with the most famous of the X-Men: Logan, or Wolverine, the mutant with the unbreakable bones and the retractable metal claws, played as ever by a bulked-up Hugh Jackman.
The combo makes sense, and not just because both characters are Canadian. In earlier movies, Deadpool often made Wolverine the off-screen butt of his jokes. Both Deadpool and Wolverine are essentially immortal, their bodies capable of self-regenerating after being wounded. Both are tormented by past failures and are trying to redeem themselves. Onscreen, the two have a good, thorny chemistry, with Jackman’s brooding silences contrasting nicely with Reynolds’ mile-a-minute delivery.
I could tell you more about the story, but only at the risk of incurring the wrath of studio publicists who have asked critics not to discuss the plot or the movie’s many, many cameos. Let’s just say that the director Shawn Levy and his army of screenwriters bring the two leads together through various rifts in the multiverse. Yes, the multiverse, that ever-elastic comic-book conceit, with numerous Deadpools and Wolverines from various alternate realities popping up along the way.
I suppose it’s safe to mention that Matthew Macfadyen, lately of Succession, plays some kind of sinister multiverse bureaucrat, while Emma Corrin, of The Crown, plays a nasty villain in exile. It’s all thin, derivative stuff, and the script’s various wink-wink nods to other shows and movies, from Back to the Future to Furiosa to The Great British Bake Off, don’t make it feel much fresher. And Levy, who previously directed Reynolds in the sci-fi comedies Free Guy and The Adam Project, doesn’t have much feel for the splattery violence that is a staple of the Deadpool movies. There’s more tedium than excitement in the characters’ bone-crunching, crotch-stabbing killing sprees, complete with corn-syrupy geysers of blood.
For all its carnage, its strenuous meta-humor and an R-rated sensibility that tests the generally PG-13 confines of the MCU, Deadpool & Wolverine does strive for sincerity at times. Some of its cameos and plot turns are clearly designed to pay tribute to Fox’s X-Men films from the early 2000s.
As a longtime X-Men fan myself, I’m not entirely immune to the charms of this approach; there’s one casting choice, in particular, that made me smile, almost in spite of myself. It’s not enough to make the movie feel like less of a self-cannibalizing slog, though I suspect that many in the audience, who live for this kind of glib fan service, won’t mind. Say what you will about Marvel — I certainly have — but it isn’t nearly as stupid as Deadpool says it is.
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