The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a staple of the movie-going experience for over ten years now, and audiences have watched it grow and change into something much more intricate and sometimes unwieldy. It’s seen actors and heroes come and go, as well as wide-ranging behind-the-scenes changes, from Fox having its stable of Marvel titles to the current unification of the Marvel brand under Disney. The latest title, Deadpool & Wolverine, follows the “merc with the mouth” (Ryan Reynolds) and features the return of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). It’s a mostly entertaining, anarchic-to-a-point time.
Deadpool & Wolverine catches us up with Deadpool and what he’s been up to in the years since Deadpool 2, namely trying (and failing) to join up with The Avengers. This failure profoundly touches Deadpool’s life: he starts working at a used car dealership, his relationship with Vanessa is gone, and he’s seemingly content to aim for the middle and stop striving for anything more.
As Wade Wilson moves through his day-to-day life the TVA (or Time Variance Authority) plucks him out of his existence. Agent Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) has chosen Deadpool to help him “prune” his universe since it’s lost its “anchor being,” an entity so important to a timeline that its absence can make a universe disappear forever. Wolverine, naturally is the anchor being of Deadpool’s universe, but the big guy passed away after the events of 2017’s Logan.
With his timeline in jeopardy, Deadpool decides to bring back a Wolverine from another timeline, but this one is a hero in exile, a Wolverine who failed his universe. The pair are eventually plopped in the void, with all the other beings that were deemed too troublesome or useless to be part of their timelines. They then have to work together to come back and save Deadpool’s universe from annihilation.
Deadpool & Wolverine uses the multiverse as a way to breed merry chaos across its 127-minute runtime. There is a bounty of cameos that will make the most online, most dedicated Marvel fans glow with excitement, and plenty of unhinged meta-comedy about the Fox-Disney merger, and the state of the MCU now. It’s a film whose humor is anchored by the chemistry of its two leads, Jackman and Reynolds playing off each other with warmth. The pair’s performances are a strong foundation for the rest of the movie’s merciless, sometimes self-indulgent sense of humor. The jokes always feel a hair away from being unwatchable, and yet, I did laugh a few times.
There is an emotional undercurrent that Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t afraid to dive into, but the humor and low stakes of the superhero genre can cut away at that – how invested should we be in these characters if we know they’re going to come back anyway? Emotional issues aside, there’s some visual lack of imagination that weighs the film down, too. The look and feel are flat, favoring muted tones that make the voids and city streets the characters occupy feel unreal and devoid of any real life. It’s a weakness that would eat up the movie if there weren’t some delightful performances at the center of it all.
Speaking of delightful performances, the cameos I mentioned earlier are no exception. There are a host of returning heroes from Marvel’s Fox era, including Wesley Snipes as Blade, Jennifer Garner as Electra, and Dafne Keen as Laura, Wolverine’s young companion from Logan. There’s one other cameo that’s too fun to spoil here, but suffice to say they go above and beyond in their small but incredible role. Dafne Keen’s return as Laura in particular is interesting, and I wish we had spent more time with her. Beyond a few scenes of exposition, giving reassurance to this new version of Wolverine, and an admittedly badass one-liner in a battle sequence, Keen doesn’t have much to do. I understand that it’s not her movie, but given the film’s emphasis on the importance of her and Logan’s story, Deadpool & Wolverine would have benefitted from letting us spend at least one more scene with them to solidify their importance.
In the end, Deadpool & Wolverine has a lot of chaotic fun and solid performances, making a real vulgar playground out of the multiverse that Marvel has set up over the last few years. I just wish it dared to tear apart the superhero genre and take real risks with its visuals and stakes – that would have made a stronger, more interesting, and more film film.
