Deadpool and Wolverine

 2024, d. Shawn Levy - in theatre

[warning: light spoilers ahead]

I have come out of every viewing of a Deadpool movie feeling entertained, but also fucking exhausted. "The merc with a mouth" moniker certainly fits Ryan Reynolds' translation of the character from comics to live action, but I don't know why people telling him to shut the fuck up isn't a running gag in this series.

Actually I do know why... because this is Reynold's ego-driven spotlight, and he can't leave 20 second of dead silence without either making a quip or violating someone's privates with a sword, bullet or fist. It's all centered around him being funny.

Deadpool, however, is like The Fonze or Steve Urkel, he's the pop-in comic relief character that isn't really fully fleshed out and then becomes so popular they start to dominate the media they're in, and it lessens their impact or exhausts people's enthusiasm for them altogether. In other words, he's a low-dose character. I've met people who are like Wade Wilson (I'm mean quippy chatterboxes, not violent psychopaths) in real life, and they can be fun to be around, but they also suck all the oxygen out of the room, and you tend to want limit your time with them. Two hours is definitely too much.

There's a reason I don't rewatch Deadpool movies, I get exhausted just thinking about it.

This film is a buddy cop road movie, if the "cop" is replaced with "superheroes" (or, really, ultraviolent anti-heroes) and "road" is replaced with "multiverse". A buddy superhero multiverse movie (speaking of exhausting). Deadpool pairs up with a Wolverine -- "the worst Wolverine" apparently -- in an effort to save his timeline from being pruned by a rogue TVA (Time Variance Authority) agent.  

Truth, it's a lot of comic book gobblety gook that I personally enjoy but I suspect the general public has tired of and ceased caring to invest in. 

The TVA hails from the two-season Loki Disney+ series, but I think the film does a decent enough job of reintroducing it that it's just connective threads but not an essential binding agent. You needn't have watched Loki to get it (but it does help).   

The film introduces the idea of an "anchor character" to each timeline (not too dissimilar to the Spider-verse's  "anchor events" methinks). In Deadpool's reality, it's Wolverine, who died in 2018's Logan. So, metatextually (and Deadpool movies are all over the metatext, which is partly fun and also partly exhausting), with Logan's death, the Fox X-Men universe needs to be pruned from the sacred time, or so deems Mr. Paradox (Succession's Matthew McFadden, doing a lot with very little, and a real highlight), said rogue TVA agent.

So Deadpool travels the multiverse to find a new Wolverine to anchor his world and finds this drunken loser Wolverine who lost his X-Men family because he thought he was too cool for (Xavier's) school (for gifted children). But Paradox isn't going to let the buffoon and the lush just get in his way, and he sends them to the void at the end of time.

There they bicker and argue and run into a plethora of familiar, and almost-familiar faces, good and bad. There's a Mad Max vibe to the void and their version of Immortan Joe, who rules the space from within Ant Man's giant skeleton, is Cassandra Nova (an effective Emma Corrin), Charles Xavier's very evil twin.  Our titular duo barely escape her clutches and have a road adventure in the void where they encounter a variety of individuals who help them on their journey.  While the void seems much more expansive and ecologically diverse than I ever would have anticipated, it provides a pretty classic 80's fantasy adventure local for a fantasy adventure to happen. If only it didn't take 40 minutes to get there, and then, after maybe an hour of infighting and action scenes they're back on Deadpool's world where the stakes get raised again.

The usual schtick of a buddy comedy is the buddys don't like each other to start. They're an odd couple. They have different personalities. Wade Wilson won't shut the fuck up, and Logan doesn't really want to talk. Wilson is sort of a happy-go-lucky kind of guy (except, when the movie starts he's actually quite depressed by his state in life) while Logan is a raging alcoholic (the amount someone with the superpower of regenerative healing would have to drink in order to get drunk boggles the mind, but then Logan does chug a full 26oz bottle of whiskey and doesn't die, so there's that).  Both men are at low points in their lives, but Wade finds the purpose he's been missing, saving the world, and is trying to give that purpose to Logan, a hero who has given up.

The film is riddled with continuity issues, but when the main character of the film isn't taking things seriously, we can't really either. But that is part of my problem with Deadpool, he's not serious, and you can't take him seriously. So when they try to introduce pathos (and Reynolds is actually quite good at delivering pathos) and emotional connection, it just doesn't work for me, primarily because it's overridden by all the jokes about blowjobs and violence to nutsacks. It's the same reason I can't watch Kevin Smith movies anymore, the men have grown up but the humour is still aimed at 12-year-olds. You see a guy get hit in the taint with an adamantium-covered femur once, and yeah, it elicits an "oof", by the 5th time you're pretty numb to the trauma, and by the 10th time you're quite over it.  Yet it keeps going.

The action sequences in this are pretty tedious and lacking artistry. I could watch The Bride take on the Crazy 88s in Kill Bill a hundred times over. I was bored with every fight in this Deadpool movie within 30 seconds of one beginning. When it's Deadpool alone, or Deadpool and Wolverine fighting a bunch of faceless bad guys, there's no stakes and no excitement. These are two guys who pretty much cannot be killed, so there's no investment in them getting injured, and the goons are nobodies, which almost makes it worse the traumas inflicted upon them.  But then there's a few fights between Deadpool and Wolverine and, again, two guys who pretty much cannot be killed, and they're just inflicting pain but with no threat, which is the point, but it's far less potent than the words they could use to hurt one another. The violence is gratuitous, yet unaffecting in its excess. 

My other problem with Deadpool, and particularly Reynold's Deadpool, is that the meta-jokes really, really, really suck me out of the movie. Breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the camera is one thing, making jokes about Hugh Jackman, or Ryan Reynolds, or Blake Lively, or Marvel Studios or 20th Century Fox...yeah, they can be funny, but they destroy the very fabric of immersion into the film, the character, the story, the universe that is set up...at any expense (the film, the character, the story, the universe...we'll get back to that).

This poster gives the most accurate
impression of Deadpool's humour...
it's bumper-sticker comedy

The "universe" in question, is not actually the MCU. While it does nod towards including Deadpool in the MCU, this film is really about the end of the films of 20th Century Fox, and specifically the X-Men films. The speculation of what cameos would appear before the film came out had pretty much every major actor in Hollywood involved (Tom Cruise as Iron Man, for instance, who does not appear in the film) and every Marvel character that ever appeared on screen (or was rumoured to appear) would be involved. That the team here limited themselves to primarily the Fox characters, and even then were pretty judicious in their selection, I actually have to tip my hat to them. This could have been a non-stop cameo-fest (which is what I was bracing for) and it really wasn't. They really tried to not rest just on 'member-berries and make this a fast-paced, entertaining movie with story and character, and succeeded... well, somewhat. 

As a comic book fan, and a fan of comic book movies (yes, even still), I think with 45% less Deadpool I would love this movie (same with the two prior Deadpool movies). As it stands, I enjoyed a lot of it, but I doubt I could watch it again any time soon.  As a swan-song for 20th Century Fox, it's satisfying. Especially if it means this is the end of Deadpool and he's not being incorporated into the MCU (but, given its box-office receipts, that's highly unlikely, at least if he's incorporated into one of the planned upcoming Avengers films, he will be the Urkel he always should have been).