Too Much
At least the only Marvel offering in 2024 isn’t the worst MCU movie of the last year or so.
Deadpool & Wolverine
Director: Shawn Levy • Writers: Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams
USA • 2hrs 7mins
Opens Hong Kong July 24 • III
Grade: C
Where do you begin with the Deadpool franchise? Do you begin with Marvel? With the Lesser Canadian Ryan, Reynolds finally getting a second kick at the can and making the most of it in 2016, and surprising everyone with a genuinely witty and irreverent superhero spin that was a welcome respite from the MCU at the time? Hard to say but one thing is sure. Deadpool & Wolverine is not a movie so much as it’s a corporate merger demonstration, complete with a massive Disney flex over the closing credits. The script – by five fucking people! – is less a script than a series of IP callbacks, MCU references, in-jokes and cameos (one of which admittedly is the film’s best gag) strung together to make a loose narrative. Anyone who really wants to get everything from Reynolds’s latest “cheekily self-conscious” vanity project (which is just a vanity project) would also do well to be up-to-date on trade news; if you’re really lucky you sat in on Disney’s last quarterly earnings call.
Which goes to the point that D & W is less a movie than an asset. Yes, I’ve complained about this before, but the ballsiness of it here doesn’t make it, erm, ballsy. It’s depressing. The third and possibly final entry in the franchise has so much going on it warrants the repeat fanperson views the producers are banking on for its highly probable fat box office returns. But all that stuff going on makes D & W nigh on incomprehensible as to what it wants to be. Corporate piss-take? Loving character farewell? Meta-adventure? All of the above? Who knows, but Reynolds’s budding acolyte Shawn Levy (Free Guy, The Adam Project, the in-production Boy Band which I can promise will be insufferable) isn’t really the director for the job, despite having directed co-star Hugh Jackman in Real Steel. There’s a lot of moving camera, a lot of swearing and a lot of slo-mo gore, but there’s so little film construction you feel like calling up the DGA and telling them they may have been too quick to sign a new contract. Maybe AI can direct a film. But Deadpool fans aren’t going to give a shit what I say so…
How we all look at Reynolds
Bloated story short: It’s been six years since Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Reynolds) struck out with X-Force and retreated to a quiet, unremarkable life selling cars with his pal Peter (Rob Delaney). Vanessa (completely useless Morena Baccarin) is long gone, but he has his blind roommate Al (Leslie Uggams), that cabbie, the metal dude and the emo chick and her Sailor Moon girlfriend for company. One day, though, Time Variance Authority agent (hope you watched Loki) Mr Paradox (Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, Matthew Macfadyen) pulls him into the office and tells him he has a mission for him. Somehow, to stop his timeline from being erased, he has to hop into another timeline, scoop up an anchor hero, which now that Disney has its grubby little mitts on the X-Men IP is of course Logan/Wolverine (Jackman, showing off an 8,000 calories per day, 55-year-old anti-dad bod!). He’s dead, but fuckit, multiverse, right? Off they go to save the world. Worlds. You can feel the smug emanating off D & W, and you can almost see Reynolds and Levy “brainstorming” all the clever comments they’re going to make in the film and patting themselves on the back for their genius. But one, maybe two, barbed jabs at Disney is a good burn. Twelve or 13 isn’t speaking truth to power anymore. It’s just tiresome, and tired.
Franchise staples Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland: Double Tap), and comic and TV writer Zeb Wells join Reynolds and Levy for the genius and send the duo to bicker and snark in The Void after Deadpool forcibly recruits The Worst Wolverine, where they meet the film’s big bad, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin, The Crown), telepath Professor X’s twin (you can tell they’re related, because bald). There’s all sorts of shit in The Void to explode nerd heads, and in fairness there are some good gags and tremendously surprising (and welcome) cameos that work. The less you know the better. There’s also a Nice Deadpool with Peggy the UK’s Ugliest Dog as Dogpool. The Summer of the Pet marches on.
Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t awful. It’s not the worst MCU movies to hit screens since Endgame (still probably Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania), but it does remind us how badly these movies demand a strong central – dare we say anchor – to build on. Jackman’s performance is a highlight and supplies D & W with the little emotional heft it has (it also allows someone, anyone, to tell Reynolds to shut up for five seconds and ask how he can be so thirsty for attention). Marvel devotees will likely have fits when the montage of Wolverine variants pops up (the one Reynolds/Deadpool tells us is coming, natch), not that it serves the plot. Well, it certainly served music publishers; the needle drops are relentless and could easily account for 14% of the total budget. A couple of seconds from “The Greatest Show” isn’t amusing. It’s distracting. The whole movie is distracting and that smothers its best bits. Again, it has its moments. Cassandra’s mind meld technique is visually arresting even if she’s yet another shaky MCU villain, Macfadyen can do snide, snivelling bitchy in his sleep and look excellent doing it, Jackman takes his shirt off. Jackman or Powell in the rain? You decide. But Reynolds’s non-stop mugging and self-satisfied, smarmy jokesterism brings D & W right up to a line some won’t be able to cross (me), and then ends with a big swig of the Disney Kool-Aid. WTF? That’s a company man move, Ryan. — DEK