Deadpool & Wolverine’s cynical mocking of all things Marvel is its secret weapon. No wonder it’s making a killing at the box office.
Still from Deadpool & Wolverine. (Marvel / 20th Century)
After an immensely profitable opening weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine is on track to dominate the international summer box office. Clearly, it’s hit a sweet spot for audiences. It combines nostalgia for superhero movies past with a relentless barrage of witty acknowledgements that the whole genre, when you get right down to it, was all a bunch of crap anyways.
The crap theme is very thoroughly sustained by writer-director Shawn Levy. In the film, both title characters are depicted as down-and-out rejects, cast out of more respectable superhero circles. Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) — back in a belated sequel to Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018) — is desperate for a shot at Avengers team membership. But he botches the job interview and winds up as the ultimate loser, newly single after his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) breaks up with him. He’s left working as a used car salesman with a bad toupee staple-gunned to his head.
“It’s a hair system,” he insists. “Balayage.”
He’s offered another shot at achieving greatness by a scheming Time Variance Authority (TVA) bureaucrat Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen of Succession in amusing British villain mode). Inquiring about the job on offer, Deadpool asks, “Will I marvel at how cinematic it is?”
But it turns out his superhero dream job will have to be in another universe because Deadpool’s own world is being steadily destroyed. Deadpool finds that this is an offer he can definitely refuse, because even if his own life is garbage, he still has friends in this world who are worth rescuing. Nine friends, to be exact, who all recently attended his surprise birthday party, and he carries around the Polaroid shot to prove it. Among the friends I was pleased to see Rob Delaney still on the payroll as fellow car salesman Peter Wisdom, and Leslie Uggams still playing Deadpool’s cocaine-loving roommate “Blind Al.”
Sample dialogue:
WOLVERINE (appalled): “You call her ‘Blind Al’?!”
DEADPOOL (helpfully explaining): “Yes, because she’s blind.”
Anyway, it seems that Deadpool’s world is expiring because of the death of its stabilizing “anchor being.” That turns out to be James “Logan” Howlett aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). So Deadpool goes in search of the bad-tempered lupine anti-hero. Jackman’s Wolverine died in his last film outing, the well-reviewed Logan, while saving his young protege. But Deadpool, who knows Wolverine has regenerative powers much like his own, doesn’t believe he’s dead and goes to dig up his grave. He gets a rude shock at the gravesite, and then finds inventive uses for Wolverine’s adamantine skeleton in the lively fight scene that follows.
This means Deadpool has to find another Wolverine who’s still alive somewhere in the multiverse. And if you found yourself groaning at the very idea, there’s a scene in which Deadpool breaks the fourth wall yet again to acknowledge how much the multiverse tends to suck. He feels your pain.
After a montage showing various encounters with an assortment of Wolverines that you can readily imagine, Deadpool winds up with “the worst Wolverine.” He’s a lugubrious barfly still guilt-ridden over his failure to save his own world, and he wants no part of any new altruistic endeavors.
Nevertheless, they join forces, sort of, when not engaged in epic battles with each other. One of them is choreographed to the up-tempo love song from Grease, “You’re the One That I Want.”
There’s a central sequence in the wildly overplotted narrative when Deadpool and Wolverine cement their trash status by getting hurled into “The Void,” a desert penal colony where all the “useless” rejects from various worlds are jettisoned. “It’s kinda Mad Max–y,” observes Deadpool as overly familiar degenerate wasteland types in huge vehicles pulled chariot-style by motorcycles circle around mindlessly.
In The Void, they encounter various other superheroes played by well-known actors I can’t name because I’ll be assassinated by the Disney Anti-Spoiler Hit Squad or something. They’re comically obscure superheroes, or else well-known but graying and long retired, or perhaps they never really got off the ground in the first place with vaguely planned film franchises.
Still from Deadpool & Wolverine. (Marvel / 20th Century)
But the plot stuff doesn’t really matter because the whole movie is powered by the central bromance between Deadpool and Wolverine — heavily advertised in a bunch of winking promo images suggesting homoerotic love between the two superheroes. That plus Deadpool’s rapid-fire snark. He’s constantly giving us inside-baseball reminders of the recent troubled studio history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), such as Disney having acquired 20th Century Fox and with it, the X-Men franchise.
As Deadpool notes gleefully about Jackman’s Wolverine, “Fox killed him off, Disney brought him back, and now they’re gonna make him do this till he’s ninety.”
At age fifty-five, Jackman is so musclebound his arms rest in an akimbo position, pushed out by his massive chest. He looks like a heart attack waiting to happen, but he’s still an ideal Wolverine, there’s no getting around it. Put Jackman in metal claws and big sideburns and a feral snarl and those weird wolf-ear peaks in his hair, and somehow his star wattage burns ten times brighter.
As for Reynolds, he’s found his definitive role as Deadpool because his smarmy voice is set on auto-snark anyway, and also because his highly punchable face is obscured by his mask most of the time and shown to be horribly disfigured by burn scars the rest of it. The scarring makes Reynolds far more likeable. We get a reminder of just how maddening Reynolds’s frat boy visage is in its unaltered state when one of the multiverse Deadpools, the naïve, mild-mannered, blandly smiling “Nicepool,” makes an extended appearance. You’ll feel intensely that he must die.
Extreme and inventive violence and so many swears plus a number of colorful drug and sexual references have given this Disney film an R rating, but it’s still the goofball lark you’d expect to see. It’s kind of a shame the kids can’t go, actually, because the juvenile level of the humor is perfect for the pre-teen set. But overall, the movie is pitched at the widest possible audience. There’s a lot to love for the fans of this stuff, of course.
But even if you hate the MCU and everything related to it, after decades of being bludgeoned by loudly hyped product, you might at least get some amusement out of the cynical mockery of all things Marvel and take pleasure in ignoring all the typically convoluted plotting.
Not having to know about the “sacred timeline” is the gift that keeps on giving.