Seemingly willed into existence by hungry fans, the Deadpool movies may not have been great action films or even superhero installments, but at their best they scratched an itch for some ironic self-awareness, extreme violence, and other R-rated shenanigans that the usual comic book fare either can’t, or just generally doesn’t have on, offer. Buoyed by the basically can’t-miss casting of Ryan Reynolds (who has steadily become a big creative force for the series) as a loudmouthed, irritating jerk prone to bouts of therapy-speak sincerity, the first two movies found a nice little niche for themselves. Then Disney bought Fox, the Marvel Cinematic Universe wrapped up its big storyline with Endgame and promptly started to fall off a creative cliff, and then suddenly Deadpool didn’t really seem like he had a future on screen anymore.
Well, remember that aforementioned MCU cratering? Maybe a fourth-wall breaking, cameo-generating, endless fan-service machine is exactly what this ailing franchise needs. And so, now that Kevin Feige has access to Fox’s roster of also-rans and never-made-its, we can bring in a ringer. Even though Logan died at the end of Logan, all of the MCU’s multiverse shenanigans, enabled by IP ownership transition, can bring him back to life. So now we get Deadpool & Wolverine, which on paper should be an easy target to hit, but in execution turns out to offer so little of an actual story and feels so seemingly desperate to right whatever ship is still sailing that it ends up generally feeling like 127 minutes of flop sweat.
The narrative itself struggles mightily to merely make itself evident. And, as these things increasingly go, hopefully you’re sort of caught up on the Loki Disney+ show. You see, apparently all the multiverse stuff means that the agency charged with managing timelines, The TVA (Time Variance Authority), has been trimming off all the loose ends, eliminating whole universes one at a time. In Wade Wilson a.k.a. Deadpool’s universe, he’s retired and working as a used car salesman. When TVA honcho Mr. Paradox shows up, he tells Deadpool that he can live on in the main timeline, but that his universe is being “pruned” because it lost its “anchor being,” the person who the universe revolves around, which in this case is apparently Wolverine (who, you remember, died in Logan). Rather than just take the deal and move on, Deadpool decides to go on a mission to steal a different Wolverine from yet another different universe and replace the one from his own timeline. Anyway, that doesn’t work, and, though it’s not exactly clear why, the two title characters end up exiled into a place called The Void, where they have to fight Professor X’s sister Cassandra (Emma Corrin) for some reason, possibly because she wants to turn every universe into The Void so she can rule them — again, it’s not entirely clear. (Seeing a pattern?)
Frankly, Deadpool & Wolverine is the sort of thing that you’re not expected to really keep up with. Judging by the movie that actually unfolds around all that setup, Deadpool’s fourth-wall breaking and constant profanity and penchant for bloody slaughter is meant to just paper over all that stuff. You also get at least a half-dozen cameos from actors who’ve appeared in previous movies based on Marvel comics but not the MCU proper, all so the characters can have “a shot a redemption.” Let’s be clear: none of this stuff is intrinsically a bad idea, especially given this particular character’s general relationship to metatextual elements and very inside-baseball wisecracks. The problem is that in this case almost none of it sticks. It’s hard to invest in characters who by their own admission have no real interest in continuing to exist, and the delivery device for this is so simultaneously steeped in ironic detachment and dependent on your emotional investment that it just cancels itself out. Making jokes about how nobody can ever die in these things doesn’t make it less boring that they aren’t dying or that there never seem to be any lasting consequences.
But hey, isn’t the action at least fun? Well, yes and no. It’s refreshing to see a lot of grue in something like this, but at the same time it’s of the largely digital tableaux variety, a lot of slow-motion bullets and backflips butting right up against a sea of computer-generated blood. It’s all a bit weightless, just like the rest of the movie. Deadpool would probably say the whole thing really smacks of effort, man. Look, there will be a lot of fans who eat this right up, and they won’t be wrong to do that — it’s been precisely calculated to be very thirst-quenching for a large swath of the audience. Everyone else should seek refreshment elsewhere.
DIRECTOR: Shawn Levy; CAST: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 7 min.
