Film Review: Deadpool & Wolverine
Film
Deadpool & Wolverine
Director: Shawn Levy
Maximum Effort and 21 Laps Entertainment
In Theaters 07.26
Film icon Martin Scorsese famously said that the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t cinema, and at the risk of losing my geek cred, sorry, folks, but I don’t disagree. That doesn’t mean I hate Marvel—In fact, sometimes I really love it. I just feel that it’s a soulless, monolithic product, chiefly concerned with spectacle and quantity, and at its best has a minimal connection to film as an art form, and at worst, works against it. If that is the case, then Deadpool & Wolverine would be the epitome of whatever is one step below “not cinema”.
Six years after the events of Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds, Free Guy, IF) is no longer working as a mercenary or super anti-hero. After his appeal to join the Avengers was rejected, Wade lost all confidence in himself, broke up with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, Firefly, The Good House) and is working as a used car salesman. When Wade is approached by the Time Variance Authority (TVA)—an organization outside of time and space that oversees tasked with preserving the timeline—an agent named Paradox (Matthew Mcfadyen, Pride & Prejudice, Frost/Nixon) recruits him for a new mission. Wade’s home universe is going to cease to exist, and his only hope of saving it involves finding a variant of his universe’s deceased ultimate hero, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, X-Men, The Greatest Showman), to help him put things right. The problem? The only variant of Wolverine he can find is an alcoholic shell of a man, renowned as “the worst Wolverine,” and has no interest in being a hero.
The first 45 minutes of Deadpool & Wolverine is a grueling chore to sit through, as the audience is bombarded with a steady stream of unwieldy exposition punctuated by graphic violence and the all-purpose failsafe of constant, unmotivated F-bombs. Are they offensive or upsetting? No, but they are far from inherently funny or edgy, either. It doesn’t help that director Shawn Levy (Free Guy, The Adam Project) is hardly in the same league as Deadpool 2 helmer David Leitch in terms of skill at staging intricate action, and much of it doesn’t even play like action, just tediously repetitive bloodbath after bloodbath. Levy also floods the film with constant needle drops of rock songs, some more effective than others and all played far too loud. When it gets to the point that he’s literally cramming in songs on top of the score by composer Rob Simonsen (Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Whale), it becomes almost unbearable.
The good news is that the second half of the movie is much stronger than the first and when it settles into a groove as a formula superhero movie, there’s a good deal of fun to be had here. In terms of the self-referential meta humor, the most welcome aspect of Deadpool & Wolverine is the way that it viciously sinks its claws into Disney and Marvel over the major slump that the franchise has been in for the past couple of years, yet it follows the same paint by numbers formula as the majority of those films. The most memorable elements of the movie are things that I can’t talk about directly without major spoilers, but some are quite delightful, though I want to be clear that those hoping for major developments in terms of moving through the MCU forward are likely to feel extremely underwhelmed.
In terms of the performances, the major selling point here is Jackman. While it’s not among his greatest performances in the role of Wolverine, he still brings his A-game, and there’s some surprisingly effective dramatic gravity to this variant’s story. Jackman’s portrayal of the character’s pain and guilt is riveting, and even if it can’t compare to his last outing in the 2017 masterpiece Logan, the film transcends itself in these character-based moments. The comedic chemistry between Jackman and Reynolds is considerable, and Reynolds even has some solid dramatic moments, but a little bit of Deadpool goes a long way, and there were times when I really missed the Weapon XI version of the character who had his mouth sewn shut. Emma Corrin (The Crown, My Policeman) is quite effective and intriguing as Cassandra Nova, the telekinetic villainess with a peripheral connection to Wolverine, and it’s fun to see Mcfadyen flexing his comedic muscles. The performances that are most fun, however, are the ones I can’t talk about, lest the Disney and Marvel gods smite me with a curse.
Deadpool & Wolverine is sure to delight fans of the Deadpool franchise and those who can’t get enough of all things Marvel. It’s certainly not a game-changer for the MCU, however. In fact, it’s barely an MCU movie, it’s just a highly self-indulgent wrap party for the era of 20th Century Fox movies that are now designated as Marvel Legacy films. It’s a gimmicky movie tie-in event that certainly ranks above The Star Wars Holiday Special, but below The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. –Patrick Gibbs
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