Deadpool & Wolverine is like your friend that peaked at high school – the humour, the frat bro homophobic jokes are a comparison to the sort that your friend still obsessed with The Office adores. It’s Deadpool’s humour to a t, the trying-too-hard to be witty self-aware but without the heart or the soul of David Leitch’s Deadpool 2 a flawed but fun affair that had least had entertaining action sequences and a storyline that wasn’t bogged down in favour of being a glorified MCU clip show. Right from the start, jokes are made about it, but just because a film is aware to make jokes about it doesn’t give it a pass – it riffs off more things than Rebel Moon and expects a pass because it has Deadpool state that he’s in Mad Max and make a few quips about Furiosa. What’s more, the jokes aren’t funny – for a comedy, I didn’t laugh once. That’s not a good sign – except neither did anyone in my audience. I was not alone. And what’s more all this film does with these imitations from a director who barely has any craft or care of his own, sharing pirated videos of his own film on twitter on opening weekend as part of a spoiler-flooded salvo, fails to best anything that he’s poking fun at. For all the self-awareness of Shawn Levy to congratulatory use Deadpool to claim that the MCU is back now, his entries aren’t as strong as other films in the bloated, tired multiverse saga – if anything, it’s worse.
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| Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine |
The film brings back Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and it’s a credit to Jackman that he’s capable of playing the straight bad cop to Deadpool’s merc-with-a-mouth. It’s part of Reynolds’ insufferable, boyish charisma to poke fun, but he doesn’t have the acting ability to make the heavier scenes work, robbing Deadpool & Wolverine of its heart and soul. It’s almost unfair to pair him up against someone as good as Hugh Jackman and the problem of Reynolds becomes so apparent by the fact that the two best scenes of the movie don’t involve Deadpool at all, in what predominantly, is still his own movie – and no matter how much the film sets out to tell you that it’s not ruining Logan’s legacy, it somehow makes Jackman’s supporting role cheaper and the ending bittersweet. The best scenes of the movie despite this are the scenes where a different Wolverine to the one in Logan is forced to reckon with his past, and a scene with Dafne Keen’s X-23 is welcome – acting more of an epilogue and less of a sequel. The “third act flashback” to the different Wolverine’s past feels like it reminds you occasionally that there is a good movie in here, if it just got rid of its lead character and became an X-Men film instead.
Its Deadpool & Wolverine’s biggest problem that its strengths are when anybody but Deadpool is on screen – the supporting cast of cameos show up in a knowing love-letter to the FOX universe, with even a surprise appearance from Channing Tatum’s Gambit – instantly delightful, happy to be here, often rumoured but never happened, and Elektra and Blade in addition to Chris Evans’ Johnny Storm, as all Chris Evans does is show up in cameos in Ryan Reynolds projects. It feels like it should be a love letter to not just the X-Men universe but instead the world of Fox, but feels like it does nothing more with these characters other than to bring them back because they’re there. Gimmicks everywhere you look, and I preferred the execution of the multiverse in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness over this glorified cameo-fest that mistakes multiverse for cameos and feels like far too much of a clip-show, something that you’d expect from the twenty third season of The Simpsons, not a major blockbuster. Exposition galore and poor dialogue is back-ended by poorly lit, poorly choreographed action sequences that lack the intensity of David Leitch’s Deadpool 2; paying homage to Oldboy without any of the creative flair, and feel like they don’t have the same weight – the sequel remains the strongest entry in the franchise.
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| Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool & Wolverine |
Cassandra Nova is a worthy antagonist and one of the most memorable that Marvel have had since Thanos, thanks in no small part due to the excellent performance by Emma Corrin, who holds the whole movie together having the most fun they’ve had in ages as Charles Xavier’s long-lost sister. It’s where the film dares to take off and dares to have a bit of fun, because otherwise, the whole thing just feels so hamstrung by its need to try to have fun that it never actually remembers to have fun in the process - there have been movies out this year that I've enjoyed watching more than this, for all the cries of "you don't know how to have fun?" - this is boring even for a Marvel film, a chore with no stakes and no heart, spending half the time with an exposition-laden script and jokes that were past their sell-by date in 2003. Will Deadpool & Wolverine save the MCU? No - instead, it's on life support.
