NATHAN WEINBENDER:
Deadpool & Wolverine is less a feature film than it is a fan service machine specifically calibrated for opening night crowds. It’s full of up-to-the-minute references and in-jokes and surprise cameos, and it practically comes pre-built with applause breaks. The movie seems to know exactly what the people want and is happy to deliver it, and its puppy-dog eagerness is intermittently amusing and irritating.
This time around, Deadpool is summoned for a mission by the Time Variance Authority, though the agent played by Matthew Macfadyen has dastardly intentions. Through a series of multidimensional convolutions, Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool must save his timeline from total erasure by teaming up with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and it doesn’t matter that he died at the end of 2017’s very good Logan because anything and anyone can and will come back in the world of comics.
Wolverine is the glowering straight man to Deadpool’s incessant riff machine, and they fight a lot. Sometimes to bloody effect, which doesn’t do either of them much good, since they both have regenerative powers. They hop from one set piece to the next, including a cosmic junkyard called the Void, and they encounter so many recognizable Intellectual Properties of superhero films past that the film almost starts to feel like one of those old sitcom reunions.
And like any sitcom, there isn’t a joke that this movie can’t run into the ground. The screenplay is credited to five writers, including Reynolds and director Shawn Levy, and because it’s throwing so many jokes at us, a few are bound to hit. But even the decent gags feel recycled—there are only so many times that I can smile when a blood-spurting action scene is set to an incongruous pop song, and there are at least three in this movie.
Here’s the point where, like Deadpool, I have a self-aware moment and wonder why I’m even bothering to review this, especially because the movie comes with built-in criticism deflection. Do I think the movie is lazy for trotting out yet another plot involving the Marvel multiverse? That its plot is both simultaneously overstuffed and wafer thin, and that the villains are afterthoughts? That Deadpool’s barrage of puns, obscenities and digs has gone from amusing to exhausting? I do, but hey, the movie thinks so, too, and it’s going to look directly into the camera and say it out loud, so now aren’t I dumb for even thinking it?
But admitting you’ve half-assed something doesn’t absolve you of half-assing it. Deadpool & Wolverine at least has more energy than some of Marvel’s recent throwaways, but it’s disparaging the MCU’s exhausted story beats while dutifully hitting all of them. It’s like it wants to put a nail in its own coffin, although its inevitable box office success just means we’ll get more.
In the last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about so-called superhero fatigue, and whether or not it’s a real phenomenon, it’s impossible to ignore that the Marvel assembly line has been cranking out increasingly flimsy products. Deadpool himself sums it up in one of his first encounters with Wolverine: “Welcome to the MCU,” he says. “You’re coming in at a low point.” It’s a funny line, but perhaps Mercs that live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
