Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Review: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

 by Rob DiCristino

“Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point.”

If “talking about things that happen in the movie being reviewed” counts as spoiling things, then spoilers ahead:

What a difference a few years makes, huh? When Deadpool 2 premiered in 2018, Tony Stark was still alive, Steve Rogers was still Captain America, and the MCU still ruled Hollywood, with almost a year to go before Avengers: Endgame brought the Infinity Saga to its epic conclusion. At the time, Ryan Reynolds’ trash-talking antihero felt like a check on that cultural hegemony, a Shakespearean chorus reminding overenthusiastic audiences that no one should be taking this tights-and-capes stuff too seriously. And while neither Deadpool (2016) nor its sequel are the postmodern deconstructions they seem to think they are — both are boilerplate superhero jaunts with edgelord sprinkles — there was still something punk rock about bringing the Merc with the Mouth to the big screen: Before its acquisition by Disney, Fox was struggling to stay relevant, churning out unremarkable — and often unwatchable — superhero fare that failed to conjure the same interest as the MCU. Deadpool was a balm for that inadequacy, a vulgar David landing small but meaningful blows on an unstoppable Goliath.
Cut to 2024, when Shawn Levy’s threequel Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t just a proper MCU film; it's the only one on the release calendar for a span of fifteen months. Your little brother’s favorite fox is now running the hen house, and after saturating the market with unremarkable — and often unwatchable — pablum of its own for a few years, Marvel Studios is hoping against hope that he can get it back into fighting shape. To help, he’ll recruit a whole cavalcade of familiar faces, including Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine — well, a variant of him. Actually, in true Deadpool fashion, let’s back up a bit: Soon after he manipulated time to bring his friends back to life at the end of Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson has hit a rough patch. Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) has dumped him, he’s working in used car sales with Peter (Rob Delaney), and worst of all, the studio that makes his movies has been absorbed by its competitor! How will a murder-obsessed, cocaine-snorting, sexual deviant like Deadpool fit into the family-friendly, focused-grouped, four-quadrant MCU?

Actually, let’s back up again (These stops and starts are needlessly disorienting, aren’t they? Yes they are, Deadpool movies!). Our story begins in earnest when a Time Variance Authority suit called Paradox (Matthew Macfayden) abducts Wade and gives him bad news: After Logan’s death in the James Mangold film of the same name, the 20th Century Fox Marvel timeline has lost its key figure and is set to be pruned out of existence. For reasons alluded to but never explained, Deadpool is given the opportunity to join the Disney timeline on the condition that he lets his world die off as intended. Hoping to save his friends — Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), Dopinder (Karan Soni), and all the rest — Wade instead steals world-hopping tech and returns with a variant Logan to take the dead one’s place. Since this doesn’t suit Paradox’s nefarious purposes, he banishes them to the post-apocalyptic Void, where IP is sent when it outlives its usefulness. There, our heroes encounter Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), a telepathic mutant who rules with an iron fist.
Exhausted yet? Let’s skip to the end: Deadpool and Wolverine have to team up to escape the Void and stop Cassandra from using a time MacGuffin to destroy the universe. Along the way, they’ll punch, claw, stab, shoot, and occasionally molest each other while tossing off winking references to everything from the embattled Blade reboot to Hugh Jackman’s divorce. Credited to five screenwriters (including Reynolds) but surely tinkered with by many more, Deadpool & Wolverine is a carefree fuck-around of a movie packed to the gills with enough shout-outs, Easter eggs, and cameos to bring Reddit to its knees. Though it’s tangentially connected to the MCU — You’ll need a working knowledge of Loki and Doctor Strange to make sense of the smaller plot mechanics — it’s fans of the Fox Marvel Universe (?) who have the most to gain from enduring all 128 of the film’s laborious minutes. Without spoiling Deadpool & Wolverine’s truly unhinged roster of special appearances, suffice it to say that anyone who was watching superhero movies in the early 2000s is in for a treat.

That’s about all they’re in for, unfortunately, as Deadpool & Wolverine manages to combine the laziest habits of the Deadpool series with the most catastrophic failings of the modern MCU. While two or three of the five stories it’s trying to tell have some level of coherence — Wade’s mission to Disney-up and become an Avenger to impress Vanessa is an idea, as is the wayward Fox heroes’ desire to earn the happy ending they were denied by corporate malfeasance — Deadpool & Wolverine is too distracted by self-aggrandizing bullshittery to develop any of them to fruition. So much is made of Hugh Jackman returning to his most famous role in a comics-accurate suit — a few of them, actually — that no one seems to notice that his character arc is nearly identical to that of Logan, a film that Reynolds and company eagerly lambast at every opportunity. By the end, Deadpool & Wolverine makes Multiverse of Madness and Quantumania look like carefully-measured exercises in dramatic precision. But really, who cares? There’s a dog dressed like Deadpool! Clap, you brain-dead savages!
Deadpool & Wolverine could have been a transformative moment in the history of the MCU. Bringing in two of the franchise’s most popular characters — one of whom being famous for pulling no punches — to reset the game board during a period of creative crisis would have given Disney a chance to shake off recent missteps and earn back its audience’s enthusiasm. In-text, it would have been an opportunity to develop Deadpool from snarky sideliner to one of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes — a desire which, again, he explicitly expresses in the first ten minutes — allowing him to take a leadership role in upcoming team adventures that are in desperate need of a centerpiece character. Instead, Deadpool & Wolverine is content with being a grating, mindless elegy for characters remembered exclusively by fans approaching middle age. It’s a proud declaration of Deadpool’s — and Disney’s — arrested development, conclusive proof that the MCU is as creatively bankrupt as audiences have feared for years. Reynolds and Jackman are having fun, sure, but they’ve left absolutely nothing behind for the rest of us.

Deadpool & Wolverine
hits theaters on Friday, July 26th.

3 comments:

  1. I only read your conclusion (you know, spoilers), but you're saying pretty much what i thought it would. Plus i kept saying it's gonna be a 'spot the reference/cameo game' that fans seem to like to much. It's not my jam. I'll see it at some point. I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as i can until then.

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  2. Approaching middle age? Already watching it recede in the rearview mirror.

    I met Liefeld at our local comic shop in Spring of 1990 when I was 15 and before he’d created Deadpool.

    As I’ve had his “What If… Wolverine Was an Agent of Shield” comic hanging on the wall of wherever I’ve lived for 35 years, I suppose I may not be the most objective critic of D&W.

    Yes, it was overlong by 20 or 30 minutes. But aside from that it was true to the spirit of Deadpool and the set pieces were fun.

    Better than Deadpool 2, but not as good as Once Upon a Deadpool, if that makes any sense. It sincerely warmed my heart seeing Laura at the table along with Shatterstar, Yukio, and the rest.

    And really, any movie where Matthew Macfadyen is channeling Richard E Grant’s Darwin Mayflower from Hudson Hawk can’t be all that bad.

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    Replies
    1. OMG CHRIS! YOU JUST MADE MY DAY!!!

      Less than a few minutes into Mr Paradox's first scene i was struck with the exact same comparison..."this guy is TOTALLY doing Richard Grants Darwin Mayflower!!!!" It made me giddy. But i also figured id be the only human being alive to make that comparison (Team Hudson Hawk for life). The Mayflowers may be the least appreciated, all time awesome, villians in movie history. Soooooo glad you saw the same vibe.

      "If Davinci was alive today he'd be eating microwave sushi, naked, in the back of a Cadillac with both of us!" -Mayflower

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