Deadpool and Wolverine Movie Review: Shawn Levy’s buddy superhero movie: At the beginning, when Ryan Reynolds’ Wade Wilson is tasked with an Avengers-like world-saving mission, he literally breaks the fourth wall by head-butting the camera and telling Fox he’s going to Disneyland. That’s exactly what happens in the threequel: Deadpool enters the Disneyland that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it’s like Alice in Wonderland, but on signature Deadpool steroids.
(Also read: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman attend San Diego Comic-Con with Deadpool and Wolverine cameo stars. Spoilers inside!)
Deadpool at Disneyland
This turbulent marriage between Deadpool and the MCU holds up because it’s not framed as a Disneyfication of Deadpool, as many feared, but rather a Deadpoolification of the MCU. Rarely has a Marvel movie been completely R-rated. Ryan Reynolds and Levy (Free Guy and The Adam Project) push the idea by adding gore, profanity, and adult imagery to the MCU. But they do so by sticking to Deadpool’s core element – humor. Lots of humor. And no one is immune. Not even Marvel.
In this sense, Deadpool and Wolverine are to Marvel what Greta Gerwig’s Barbie was to Mattel. The studio bosses are the butt of all the jokes that are directed towards them. Deadpool uses all the recent criticism directed towards Phases 4 and 5 of the MCU for its own unabashed humor. For example, the most obvious criticism of Marvel’s resurrecting Hugh Jackman as Wolverine becomes a running joke. Deadpool suspects that a bag of money from Marvel is going to be hard to refuse, and predicts that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is now going to trust Hugh as Wolverine until he’s 90.
He also welcomes Wolverine to the MCU, but adds that he joined “at a low point.” When an army of multiple variations of Deadpool arrive from another dimension, he echoes our frustration when he says he’s fed up with all the timeline variation, multi-universe nonsense. It’s not that there’s nothing of that in this movie – there’s a lot of it. Because it seems like the MCU is no longer capable of creating high stakes without introducing multiple timelines. Well, that might mean the stakes are cosmic, but that also defeats the basic purpose of stakes-building – nothing is in concrete danger because everything is revocable.
In 2017, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine had one of the most memorable sendoffs – I’d argue it’s even better than Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame. James Mangold’s Logan was the perfect final song for a special character, and having Wolverine return in the Deadpool threequel diminishes its legacy. But it helps that the core tone of the Deadpool franchise is one of not taking itself too seriously. So for all of Hugh Jackman’s sell-out jokes, when one character being ravaged by Wolverine tells him to stop, another interjects, “Mangold tried.”
This humor is not just limited to Disney (Dogpool is referred to as Mary Poppins) and the MCU’s own films, but also to films from its rival Warner Bros. and DC. The Void, a dimension where rejected people are dumped by the Time Variance Authority, resembles a copy of Mad Max. A joke about Furiosa is also included, just as a funny joke about Batman comes up when Deadpool comments that Wolverine’s classic yellow mask makes him look “like Batman but who can shake his neck.” Ryan doesn’t spare himself either – with a sentimental reference to The Proposal (2009) and a shoutout to actor-wife Blake Lively. My favorite, however, is when he looks at the worn-out giant Ant-Man skull and says, “Paul Rudd has finally gotten old.”
The meta humor somehow helps viewers get over Marvel’s borderline annoying obsession with timeline hopping, VFX overdose, and cameo bombardment. Thankfully, the cameos don’t become audience play here as most of them have fascinating MCU lore attached to them. There are Fox characters coming back for an Avengers-like gathering, a forgotten Fox character reprising a role after emerging as a Marvel Legend, an actor playing a mutant he was supposed to play in the past but never got to, and even a now-retired DC actor cast as a Wolverine variant. Marvel could have gone further with the cameos, but it definitely treats the film as a tribute to 20th Century Fox, which it acquired in 2019. Stay tuned for the end credits to take a walk down memory lane for a high-stakes superhero story from the X-Men and Fantastic Four days.
red Yellow
Interestingly, it took Marvel to bring two of Fox’s most loved superheroes together. Their team-up was teased in the post-credits scene of Deadpool 2 in 2018. This long-in-the-making threequel has turned out to be a great buddy comedy thanks to a great actor like Ryan Reynolds. Having played the lead role in 2 films of his franchise, he has made room for Wolverine not only in the title of the film but also in the story. He has had great chemistry with his male co-stars in films like The Hitman’s Bodyguard (Samuel L. Jackson) and Red Notice (Dwayne Johnson) and Hugh Jackman is no different. Because he plays the adamantium skull and regenerative skills with such ease, as if he played the role of Wolverine just yesterday.
His straight-laced, tough-guy humor is a sharp contrast not only to his classic comic-book yellow costume, but also to Deadpool’s outrageous, loquacious humor. The fact that none of them can die, but they still hack and slash each other, makes for some action sequences that are absolutely bloody gore-filled. Watch out for the scene when all the windows on the bus turn red during Deadpool and Wolverine’s attack. It’s every blood-shed lover’s dream. Emma Corrin, as Charles Xavier’s evil twin Cassandra Nova, brings her own grungy charm to the proceedings, getting her hands dirty to enter people’s minds with her fingers (that’s a solid telepathy), which is a stark contrast to her civilized and proper British accent.
Sure, the near-immortal immortality of both of its main characters, combined with the multiverse-fueled futility of the MCU, makes Deadpool and Wolverine another superhero movie with largely predictable, low stakes plots. But like Spider-Man: No Way Home, the multiverse design is skillfully used as their one chance at atonement. The more you live, the more you fight your guilt, your insignificance. The MCU is slowly moving away from its ultimate objective of saving the world – it’s becoming more about not getting complacent about saving the world. It’s become more about fighting the fatigue of your own existence.
