Deadpool & Wolverine ☆☆☆

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin
Direction: Shawn Levy

t a certain point, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a lot more compelling than any of the stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For me, that point arrived during the end credits of the very first Iron Man movie in 2008. For the MCU itself, that point arrived with Avengers: Endgame some 11 years later, when the defining mega-franchise of the 21st century reached its most summative moment, smashed through the looking glass so hard that it shattered, and — to an even greater extent than it had thus far — began to re-center the miracle of its own success as its prevailing mythos.

That process inevitably led to the creation of a multiverse, which turned the MCU into a meta-textual jigsaw puzzle that could only be reassembled by looking for stray pieces off-screen. It didn’t take long before the sort of knowledge that used to enhance these movies became required to understand them, as blockbusters like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness were premised upon a working familiarity with the kind of corporate mishegoss (e.g. character rights, streaming ambitions, box office data) that only nerds and shareholders should ever have to know.

That pivot felt like a natural response to a moment in which the conversation around the culture had become fully inseparable from the culture itself, but the movies suffered without a grounding force of their own, and the ouroboros of it all triggered a degree of superhero fatigue that none of the Avengers were powerful enough to fight.

If only there were someone in that world — or at least adjacent to it — who could reconcile the emotional reality of the MCU with all of the extracurricular [nonsense] that had built up around it. Someone who could poke holes in the fourth wall as fluidly as Dr. Strange waltzes through the space-time continuum, use that special gift to repair his studio’s relationship with the masses, and happily adopt several decades’ worth of destructive corporate absurdity as his own cross to bear. If only there were someone who could get away with calling himself “Marvel Jesus” in a superhero movie, because the genre has frayed to a point where no one less self-aware could hope to redeem it.

Lucky for Disney, its decision to swallow 20th Century Fox like the Alioth has allowed Deadpool to enter the MCU. And lucky for Deadpool, entering the MCU — insert a painfully obvious adult joke here — has allowed him to evolve into something more than just superhero cinema’s obnoxious little brother.

You see (and I hope you’re sitting down for this), Deadpool knows that he’s in the MCU. Not only that, Deadpool knows the MCU is in desperate need of saving. And not only that, Deadpool also knows that saving it might be his only chance to prove, both to the Avengers and the audience alike, that he isn’t the “annoying one-trick pony” (his words) that both of his “infuriatingly self-satisfied, satire for babies, I want to go back in time and strangle Thomas Edison in his crib movies” (my words) made him out to be.

By that measure, Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is triumphantly half-successful — which makes it more successful by half than anything else Shawn Levy has ever directed. The good half has little to do with Deadpool as a character, as the Merc with a Mouth still combines the emotional pathos of a potato chip with the comedic range of a sixth grader who thinks he’s one joke away from landing an HBO special.

On the contrary, it has everything to do with Deadpool as a conceit, as the character’s unbridled self-awareness makes him singularly well-positioned to remind “people” why they “loved” superhero “movies” in the first place.

The endless reboots? The orphaned franchises? The naked transparency of exploiting an audience’s nostalgic allegiance to the characters they grew up with? Deadpool & Wolverine is a mega-budget movie that’s single-mindedly determined to twist those flaws into genre-defining strengths. Hell, the entire premise of its story depends upon its ability to reclaim casual audiences’ most consistent pet peeve: The fact that people almost never stay dead in these films.

I’ll give you the gist without revealing even half as much as the movie’s final trailer: Deadpool, who’s become so inextricable from Ryan Reynolds’ public persona that his reality-breaking reference to Blake Lively barely lands as a joke, is rejected from joining the Avengers and resigned to spending the rest of his days working as a used car salesman in a sad timeline where he’s single and sharing an apartment with an 80-year-old coke addict named Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). But hope avails itself when a cosmic middle-manager named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, doing a giddier and more British Tom Wambsgans) summons our hero to the Time Variance Authority and tells him that his entire universe will effectively be downsized out of existence unless he finds someone interesting enough to peg it to (that the jokes write themselves doesn’t stop the movie’s screenplay from being credited to five different people).

Deadpool couldn’t reach that bar if he were standing on a pile of money $785.8 million high, but Wolverine would definitely fit the bill. People love that guy. The only problem: In this timeline, he was dead at the end of Logan a situation that Deadpool tries — and fails — to fix in an opening credits sequence that epitomizes the good, the bad, and the Levy of Marvel’s conceptually bold, artistically bankrupt, gleefully R-rated hail Mary to save its brand.

“How can we [exhume Hugh Jackman] without disrespecting Logan’s memory?” Deadpool asks us. Then he answers his own question: “We’re not.” Cue: Deadpool gleefully using the adamantium-covered bones from Wolverine’s corpse to dismember a small army of day players as he dances to NSYNC’S “Bye Bye Bye.” The action is flimsy and garish, the joke is beaten to death harder than any of the bad guys, and the punchline is that Deadpool has cracked open Pandora’s Box. Like so many scenes in this movie, the basic fact that it’s happening is funnier than anything that actually happens in it.

Anyway, the upshot is that Deadpool has to bop around to some other timelines in order to find a Wolverine that he can drag back to his own, a montage-fueled quest that comes to an end when he settles on the worst Logan in the multiverse: A volatile alcoholic who wears his trauma as heavily as the iconic yellow suit that he refuses to take off.

Yes, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long been more compelling than any of the stories told in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and — in the process of reconciling those two stories as only Marvel Jesus could — Deadpool makes a very persuasive case that this should be the last superhero movie ever made. It won’t be. It already isn’t. The best we can probably hope for is that Deadpool 4 is similarly willing to die for all of the sins that its genre will commit between now and then.

– Courtesy: IndieWire

Rating system: *Not on your life * ½ If you really must waste your time ** Hardly worth the bother ** ½ Okay for a slow afternoon only *** Good enough for a look see *** ½ Recommended viewing **** Don’t miss it **** ½ Almost perfect ***** Perfection