After the disastrous Thor: Love and Thunder, I took a very long break from watching much of anything superhero related. Given the reactions to efforts like Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels, not to mention Marvel Studio’s increasingly horrific television output, it seemed like my instincts to bail were correct. I didn’t have to spend precious hours watching this nonsense, and then twice that amount of time writing about it. This is a good thing.
So why in god’s name did I subject myself to another Deadpool movie?
It boils down to the appeal of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. I’ve been watching this guy do his thing since high school, and it’s still one of the defining performances of the genre. I remember dragging my poor father out to see the first X-Men and his gritted teeth reaction after we made our way back to the minivan to head home. I also flash back to when I was in college and some bandmates and I saw the second X-Men, the one everyone likes. Sitting there in the audience, I had a growing sense of annoyance at the guys with me because they were making fun of all the people applauding at the little easter eggs and “audience pop moments.”
Come on guys, take this stuff seriously. It’s good! It’s modern mythology! It’s real literature! It’s an epic on par with Gilgamesh! That was basically what I felt at the time, and did for years on end. That same earnest belief in the power of comic book storytelling was what powered me to drag multiple women to watch Batman Begins with me on dates, or to gather a ton of my pals to see The Dark Knight and Watchmen in back to back summers. I was one of Stan Lee’s True Believers, having been raised on this junk for 35 years.
But with hindsight and age, I can’t help but wonder if my dad and those buddies were onto something back then.
As I sat to watch Ryan Reynolds begin to yuck it up, swinging around Wolverine’s corpse as a weapon in a fight choreographed to N’Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” ruminations like I’m too old for this crap hit me first. But then I started to think, “no, it’s Marvel who is wrong” and opening with such a stale, lifeless sequence underscored everything that’s wrong with this film; an overture, if you will.
To summarize the set-up of this third Deadpool entry, one could really just describe it as the further milking of the nostalgia teat that was kicked off when Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield got bamboozled into doing one of these. But much like with Multiverse of Madness and The Flash, we’re now in the “I understood that reference” phase of these increasingly turgid films. Perhaps the biggest sticking point is Deadpool & Wolverine’s teary-eyed reminiscence for films that are largely terrible. But that’s what director Shawn Levy and his ongoing collaborator Reynolds seemed determined to do with the shambling remains of the 20th Century Fox Marvel output.
The actual plot of the thing: Deadpool (Reynolds) has entered a period of ennui that is quickly abated by a Time Variance Authority (did you watch Loki? Too bad if you didn’t, I guess) agent named Paradox, whose bosses have deemed “the merc with a mouth” special for reasons that aren’t made terribly clear. Paradox invites Deadpool to enter the Sacred Timeline, which is just the Marvel Universe, but at the cost of the existence of his own universe and his motley found family back home. The script does little to justify a single moment of its own plot machinations, but it does at least quickly move into the fight/teamup/fight relationship between its two title characters – one of which is a multiversal variant, since the one we know has been dead for a while.
One thing I knew coming into this was that Deadpool is an acquired taste. You either enjoy middle school boy humor or you don’t. My hope going into this was that the Wolverine quotient might jettison the loosey goosey plotting into something a little more structured and perhaps even affecting. Logan absolutely rocked, and maybe there was some residual hope that Hugh Jackman‘s rugged and pained aura could give the entire production a little extra oomph. Instead, Wolverine becomes this oddly unfitting piece in the film, the tough-talking straight man that’s just dragged along for the ride. None of the five credited screenwriters seemed to have much of a handle on Logan’s character, and it flattens every scene he’s in. Sure, he’s given some background for his pain, but it’s presented in the most generic, unaffecting way possible. That so much of what happens in the film also cheapens the power of Logan’s final end in James Mangold’s film makes these creative decisions all the more regrettable.
So much of this could at least be ignored for a time, if not forgiven, if the story was worth a damn. Frankly, there isn’t much of a story at all. Deadpool & Wolverine is just a buttload of quips tied together by cameos and easter eggs. It’s the sort of movie that feels like it was generated in a lab to specifically create content for Youtube explainer videos and for the kind of middle-aged fanboy that likes to point at the screen because it makes reference to something he’s watched 200 times. And god, if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of the comic book movie rumor mill and the corporate machinations that got us to this point, there’s a strong chance you’re going to find yourself completely adrift.
There’s one surprise supporting performance that pops up around the midway point of the film. As my partner pointed out to me, it ushers in a committed performance that feels less like it’s in on the joke, and more the kind of propulsive excitement that Marvel used to offer on a regular clip. That this diamond is surrounded by so much rough just highlights the general morass of the film by comparison. Because in the end, it doesn’t matter how much Deadpool makes fun of multiverses and how lame they are when he’s just rolling through the same motions as Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, and any other hero that’s stepped onto this perpetual storytelling rake.
By the time the credits rolled and clips of the Fox-verse films of yore flashed before me, it just stood as testament to the years I’ve wasted watching this junk. I won’t make that mistake again.
(Well, maybe for Superman.)