Jonah Naplan July 27, 2024
“Deadpool & Wolverine” is the best “Deadpool” movie yet, even if it’s not really a “Deadpool” movie at all.
Sure, it’s got all the signature violence and gore, rude and erotic jokes, explicit language, extreme fourth wall breaks, lack of restraint, and the tendency to take nothing seriously, despite attempting to have a heart of its own, that we’ve come to expect from a movie bearing the Merc with a Mouth’s name. But it’s also so much bigger than “just a Deadpool movie” in ways both large and small, good and bad.
Spoilers will be very light in this review.
“Deadpool & Wolverine” finds Deadpool/Wade Wilson (the always endearing Ryan Reynolds) thrust into a multiverse mission that seems to critique and poke fun at itself just as much as it wants the audience to take it seriously. The journey is a sort of self-fulfilling undertaking for Wade, who feels effaced by his rejection from the Avengers and has hung up the red suit to resign himself as a used car salesman fitted out with a staple-on toupee. Ushered back into action by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) and the TVA (among many other projects, the Disney+ original “Loki” series is a highly recommended prerequisite watch), Deadpool, naturally, has his questions for both these new faces and the audience—like his other two outings, the antihero narrates this entire movie; if not directly, then it’s also through his lines of dialogue to other characters that wink to the viewer that we’re all on the same page about what’s happening onscreen. Essentially, Paradox has created an (illegal) “Time Ripper” that destroys timelines that have been stripped of their “anchor being.” And since Wolverine, being that special person in Deadpool’s world, tragically died in “Logan,” Wade’s timeline is on the brink of collapse, forcing him to scour the multiverse for a “replacement” Wolverine so he can save his loved ones, including Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and “Deadpool 2” fan favorite, Peter (Rob Delaney).
Other than the fact that Deadpool eventually does find a Wolverine replacement—and it’s not the strong, confident Logan we know but a depressed and emotionally defeated Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from an alternate universe who has retreated to states of melancholy after failing to save his world—there’s really not much that can be written about the intricacies of the film’s plot without spoiling anything that the studio system doesn’t want the audience to know until they get the chance to see the movie themselves. I can best put it this way: any disappointments you may have had with other universe-hopping films such as “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” or “The Flash” will be immediately resolved within the first 45 minutes of “Deadpool & Wolverine” because the movie actually delivers on all the massive setpieces, overwhelming timelines, and crazy cameos that you could ever want, and most of it works—much better than it might in a different comic book movie—because it’s all part of the brand that Deadpool has established for himself, this time on a much, much larger scale (with a budget of over $250 million, it’s one of the most expensive MCU movies to date).
The villain this time around is an answer to the increased scale, too. Her name is Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) and she’s the bald, skinny-boned twin sister of Charles Xavier who rules over a torturous wasteland known as the Void. Playing opposite our two leads for good chunks of the movie, Corrin brings a serious, contrasting energy to this picture, similar to Kang the Conqueror from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and Hela from “Thor: Ragnarok.” She plays the role completely straight and is prone to monologuing about her ambitions which makes her an easy and obvious target for Deadpool’s ridicule, while still being highly intimidating and scary (unlike Thanos, or Namor, or Killmonger, this is a character who can literally get inside the heads of her subjects).
Deadpool and Wolverine, as the title would suggest, make a smart, entertaining duo, each of them demonstrating their typical performative tics in a surprising combination of wry commentary and combative insults. Reynolds’ usual shtick hit much harder for me this time around than in the other “Deadpool” movies, employing spiked one-liners and wicked pratfalls with equal precision. His best moments feel either completely unscripted or so perfectly scripted that they give that illusion. Reynolds gets super random and left field here, which would be more of a criticism in a different type of movie, but in a “Deadpool” film, it’s right on track. He finds himself a sublime counterpart in Jackman, whose Wolverine is stern and not too keen on nonsense. Like Deadpool, he believes that he is doing the audience a great favor by trying to shut the antihero up, even if we actually enjoy hearing the guy blabber.
Any time the two hunks fight (and, of course, they do eventually put aside their differences to team up in the third act), we know neither will ever actually die no matter how many times one of them shoots or stabs the other, not only because both of them are virtually indestructible as “mutants,” but also because the movie cannot go without Deadpool, who often comments upon the very fight that we are currently watching and that he is participating in. So, yes, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is technically a “Deadpool” movie on the principle that it features his usual lineup of thematic tricks, but it’s also so many other things; it’s a resurrection picture both for Wade, who is learning to find his purpose even if it’s not through validation from the Avengers, and for…well…lots of other things I can’t write about here; it’s a buddy movie about two gnarly souls learning to bond with each other as they go about their journey together; and it’s a cinematic imagining of what Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox looked like through Deadpool’s eyes (without specifying anything, you will want to research the various Marvel/Fox superhero projects of the early aughts because most of them will be, at the very least, verbally joked about by Deadpool in this movie).
Director Shawn Levy (“Free Guy,” the “Night at the Museum” franchise) and his co-writers Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Zeb Wells have authored a script that does not hold back one bit in its endless criticisms of Disney, the MCU, the DCEU, other superheroes, politics, society, and life itself. And the violence is just as bloody, cartoonish and hard R as the other “Deadpool” films. Impressively, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is never hampered by being a part of a traditionally PG-13 catalog of movies, and doesn’t seem to even notice that it’s now a “Disney project,” save for the moments where Deadpool explicitly mentions that it is one. The movie is just as not-for-kids as the others, even if, according to Kevin Feige, as reported by Deadpool, the one thing the movie couldn’t include was the use of cocaine or (likely) any other drugs. Otherwise, the film takes all the chances that it can possibly get to crank the raunchiness up to eleven, never sparing us the chance to cringe at the violence or scoff at all the edgy jokes.
The biggest problem is that this too-muchness becomes suffocating after a while, especially with a runtime of 127 minutes that isn’t really that long by modern comic book movie standards but is completely overwhelming for a “Deadpool” film that is always throwing us everything it’s got just to see what sticks. It especially becomes a problem in the second act when the movie, despite complaining about this exact trope, starts to drag and overexplain what’s going on, instead of letting the audience meander before segueing into a bonkers final section that had me pausing in disbelief that I was actually watching a real movie.
Comic book fans will eat it all up with delight, especially if they’ve been feeling the recent slump in the superhero movie industry (which is also mentioned by Deadpool early on because of course it is). Undeniably, “Deadpool & Wolverine” will be satisfying in the sense that it finally feels like a comic book film that really, truly cares about its audience and what they want to see onscreen even if it probably won’t replay as well in the coming years; the same way that rewatching “Spider-Man: No Way Home” on your couch just feels awkward without screaming and clapping fans sitting all around you. “Deadpool & Wolverine” is very good right now when we need it most, but as more time passes, its expiration date will start to show.
Now playing in theaters.