Deadpool and Wolverine review — Laughing in the arterial spray

Directed by Shawn Levy | Written by Levy, Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells, based on characters by Rob Liefeld, and Fabian Nicieza | 127 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Crave

The single Marvel Cinematic Universe feature to show in cinemas this year arrives with a healthy amount of hype and a full-court, all-platform promotional tour by its leads, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman — they’ve been inescapable this week. The movie also arrives at an awkward time for the studio, talks of market saturation and an audience perhaps moving away from superhero pictures. The big publicity push has clearly worked for audiences with the movie busting box office records this weekend.

The first Deadpool movie worked well enough for its satiric, self-referential humour, bringing “The Merc With The Mouth”, Wade Wilson (Reynolds) to the big screen and transferring the fourth-wall-breaking humour from the comics. The second one delivered more of the same for lovers of R-rated, violent superhero comedy even as its ribald, ironic bent rubbed awkwardly against the slathered sentiment.

That’s the case in this new movie, too, a teeth-aching meal of mushiness and nostalgia while Wilson gets to make fun of the current state of things in superhero movies.

The jumping off point is how 20th Century Fox has been bought by Disney, so this is the first time Deadpool’s been the star of an official MCU movie. What the filmmakers here are trying to do is bring Deadpool into the MCU both figuratively and literally, inserting him into a story that tilts on Marvel’s use of the multiverse while he comments on its ridiculousness.

The first act sets up his motivation — he wants to be taken seriously, to matter, and figures he belongs in the Avengers. That’s not going to happen, but he gets an offer from the TVA, the Time Variance Authority — a big part of the Loki series on Disney Plus and a regulator of timelines. One of their agents named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) will give Wilson everything he wants, fame and fortune and an Avengers membership, but he’ll have to sacrifice everything and everyone he knows. Instead, he skips between universes to find a Logan aka Wolverine (Jackman), for reasons, to help him save his friends.

Or something. The plotting here is a long way from coherent, and I say that as someone who’s seen every single Marvel movie and TV series they’ve put out. If you haven’t seen them, or any of the previous Deadpool movies, this isn’t the one to start with. Some of the references, characters, and gags are so obscure — featuring even comic heroes who never got to the big screen — that you might be a bit lost.

The Deadpool & Wolverine filmmakers aren’t too worried about that. They figure the hardcore fans of this franchise and the MCU in general will love how the picture digs into the mythology to make fun of it, populating the screen with previous Fox efforts at superhero franchises that came and went, some less successfully than others. Wilson and someone known as “the worst” Logan end up in a limbo dimension that looks so much like Mad Max they have to own it, and allowing for a lot of those old characters to show up out of the blue, hopefully without the audience asking too many questions. The antagonist here is Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), sister to Professor X and packing all his telepathic and telekinetic power, plus megalomania.

But we never really care for her and her ambition any more than we really care about any of the other supporting characters who show up — the main draw of the movie is a bromance between goofy Wilson and crusty Logan. Logan’s motivations for doing anything Wilson asks of him are a bit limp, but the movie moves at a good clip, poking our funnybone so regularly its easier to forgive its awkward leaps and frequent stumbles.

Jackman can’t help but give a solid performance, but he’s clearly not the Logan we’ve gotten to know over the past 25 years. As a result, he’s a lot less engaging because we know he’s some other guy. That’s a problem the movie never solves, and maybe doesn’t even care about. Instead, it’s happy to trot out those recognizable characters from past superhero movies for no good reason other than the actors were available, the trashiest version of fan service. Where it had genuine emotional heft in Spider-Man: No Way Home, here it just seems calculated to get a cheer from the audience but otherwise does nothing to elevate the material or the memory of those characters. An end-credits montage of behind-the-scenes footage of other 20th Century Fox movies going back to X-Men in 2000 has more resonance than anything in the pre-credit running time.

But what does it matter? The fanboys are showing up for the skewering the MCU, the dick jokes and the ultraviolence, and there’s plenty of all of those. Underneath it’s a sickly sweet story of redemption for both leads ending up feeling mostly unnecessary given the stuff this movie is really about — see above.