Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Regret is the theme of the day for Deadpool & Wolverine as Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is enlisted to reintroduce a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman)–who died in Logan–into his timeline in order to save it because of I don’t know. To help me understand the film’s plot, I thought of “fecal transplants” and how drinking someone else’s poop smoothie can repopulate your gut biome. Wolverine being the poop smoothie. I still don’t get it. Don’t act like it matters. The Wolverine Deadpool finds is full of regret because he let all of his buddies die while he was indulging his alcoholism. The good news is, he finally puts on the yellow spandex suit. (Can I be frank and confess that that’s enough for me?) The bad news is there’s so much exposition in an exercise that simply doesn’t require it. I mean, no one watching this movie voluntarily wants anything more than extreme violence and Reynolds doing his steady prattle of glee-club, gay-panic verbal diarrhea. For all that, I’m still kind of moved by the sight of these aging stars–especially Jackman, who Deadpool, in character, promises will be forced by Disney to play Wolverine until he’s 90–collected in a spoiler-alert roll call (Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Garner, Channing Tatum, Ray Park, Chris Evans, on and on) in a “forbidden zone” purgatory. Snipes and Garner have been digitally de-aged, Tatum is encouraged to be as ridiculous as possible, Evans is eulogized with a “not my favourite Chris”… It all has “an element of the pathetic,” as a dear friend once described seeing Tiny Tim on tour in an empty bar well into his dotage. As a person aging reluctantly and resentfully and, most importantly, watching all of the pop trivia I have collected over a misspent lifetime become arcane detritus, Deadpool & Wolverine actually broke me.

In a few years, this film will be akin to a Rat Pack flick for kids currently in junior-high and younger. The way I understand things like Angie Dickinson and Juliet Prowse will be how they regard Blake Lively and Jennifer Garner. Look, it’s happened already. All of these in-jokes about Ben Affleck and Hugh Jackman’s Broadway run as Harold Hill in The Music Man will land like lead balloons: the sort of references old people make to shit they still think is relevant and then make old-people faces when young people have no idea what they’re talking about. Really, Deadpool & Wolverine is a shit-eating movie about obsolescence. It’s about getting old and being forgotten, centred on a capering court jester whose job it is to tell uncomfortable truths while breaking himself–plus all sense of fourth-wall coherence–in pieces to entertain us. Deadpool & Wolverine is ultimately like “Legends of the Superheroes”, those feature-length, live-action comic-book television specials Hanna-Barbera produced in 1979. If you’ve seen them, they’re fucking awful, but friends, they filled my five-year-old bucket like no other. Just seeing my comics and action figures come to life, doing somersaults and saying their catchphrases: heaven. When I look at those shows today, it’s hard for me to believe I was ever that innocent, that easily sated by the bare minimum. Deadpool & Wolverine, I would say, isn’t the bottom of the barrel, but rather an arch running commentary on the bottom of the barrel. It’s an epitaph for an embarrassing period in pop-culture history. I didn’t hate it.