Ryan Reynolds is back as Deadpool, Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine, and the MCU rattles with nostalgia and piss-taking in Deadpool & Wolverine. Easter eggs aside, this is exactly the movie you expect, and nothing you don’t, says Travis Johnson.
And so, we come to this, Disney’s long-awaited, long-expected, much-ballyhooed combining of their mutant and Marvel assets, the former coming into the fold as part of their Fox purchase a few years back. Yes, it’s weird that corporate manoeuvring has such a big effect on our entertainment, and it’s weirder still that we’re all both aware of and okay about it.
Still, Deadpool is weird enough and elastic enough to encompass such things, and this latest offering—very much Deadpool 3 and not Wolverine 4—goes out of its way to hang a lampshade on the whole situation. Fox jokes? Yep. Disney jokes? Yep. Hugh Jackman’s divorce, the overuse of multiversal plot devices, the sheer amount of money involved in getting Jackman back in costume, the actual costume itself? All get a gag or three—especially that yellow costume. Any pointed criticism you could have is undercut by the film itself—and Ryan Reynolds himself—saying to the audience “Yeah, we know, and we’re doing it anyway”. It’s a difficult position to argue against.
Speaking of multiverses, the plot is kicked into gear by rogue Time Variance Authority (Google it—I’m in a strict word count) bureaucrat Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) pulling our lippy hero Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) out of his timeline before its scheduled destruction. Deadpool’s world has lost its central figure—no, not DP, but Jackman’s Logan, killed at the end of his eponymous film. That Logan being really, very dead (the film demonstrates this in no uncertain terms) Deadpool sets off to find another, alternate, but functionally identical Logan to sub in—and that’s your plot, more or less, with minor comics villain Cassandra Nova (Emily Corrin, very good), Charles Xavier’s evil twin, salted in for extra danger.
Here’s the thing: there’s always something fun happening on screen in Deadpool & Wolverine, with director Shawn Levy and main driving force Reynolds taking a throw-it-at-the-wall approach to comedy and spectacle that ensures you don’t have time to linger on any bits of business that fall flat before something new is up in your face. You want cameos? You got ’em, and some of them are genuinely unexpected and fun. You want Jackman as Wolverine? Well, that’s the big draw card, and you certainly get your money’s worth in that department. You want Reynolds breaking the fourth wall and indulging in all kinds of metatextual, post-modern malarkey? You’ll get it in spades, and that’s where we have a problem.
Because Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t just want to be a grab bag of laughs and violence (and let’s be real, the appeal of two characters with massive healing factors ripping into each other cannot be understated) it also wants to have a heart—but it’s hard to be sincere when the whole tone of the movie underlines that none of this is serious, and the central premise is grounded in the idea that even the most beloved dead characters can be resurrected with a bit of handwaving and trans-dimensional mumbo jumbo.
There’s a bit of business about Deadpool wanting to stake his claim as a true hero—when we meet him in this one, he’s split with Vanessa (an underused Morena Baccarin) and trying to work a normal 9-to-5 gig rather than his usual hyper-violent adventures. This might provide a starting point for a fairly shallow character arc, but doesn’t fit at all with the character we’ve known for the past two movies.
But the film treats it so lightly that it’s easy to ignore, and that’s the best advice. Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t the saviour of the MCU, but nor is it another in the recent run of fumbles. A few easter eggs aside, it’s exactly the movie you expect, and nothing you don’t. Action, jokes, genre-savvy goofiness? Yes. Anything else? No. Ah, well—could be worse.
