Time to drop the kids off at the pool…the Deadpool & Wolverine.
Yeah, that’s not the greatest pun, but Hollywood doesn’t deserve our best unless they earn it. It’s that time of the summer when the big movies come out to impress our eyeballs. Deadpool & Wolverine is one of the biggest. Does it live up to the hype? Let’s take a spoiler-free look…
Deadpool & Wolverine
The outlook hasn’t been brilliant for Marvel Phase IV. Their last few movies came and went with whimpers. We don’t even remember their names. Antman might have been in one of them. Another one was maybe titled Black Panther: Waititi Forever.
This creates a problem. Marvel likes money. Phase IV movies weren’t making enough of it. Yet, a solution presented itself. Deadpool movies from 20th Century Fox made money. Deadpool is a Marvel character. Disney acquired 20th Century Fox. Hence, it is a no-brainer to try to inject life back into the Marvel universe by releasing a Deadpool movie.
“Release it like the Kraken,” someone, somewhere, surely said.
Yet, two Deadpool movies have already graced the screen. Surely, a third one can be jazzed up somehow to make it even bigger. But how?
Bring back Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, of course! Then sit back and let the ringing of the cash registers sing one to sleep. This is wizard marketing at its finest.
Wolverine & Deadpool
So, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine is back after dying in Logan. Does that matter? Not really, the multiverse has rendered all character deaths meaningless. Maybe some Logan fans are disappointed, as they felt Logan was a fine send-off for the character.
I personally don’t care. Logan was nothing special. The fight scenes were all the same and ended with Logan coughing. He and Stephen Merchant came off as a worn-out married couple. And everyone was so depressed all the time. The whole movie smelled of actors wanting to do something “serious.”
Once again, we must recognize how well The Dark Knight Returns worked. Old age didn’t turn Batman into a little bitch. Sure, he was burned out and disillusioned, but once he got his swagger back, he was taking gang leaders apart in the mud like a surgeon with a grin on his cowled face.
I was also never super enamored with Jackman’s Wolverine. At times, the character seemed like he came from so deep in the closet with his toughness that he may as well have had mothballs for eyes.
Yet, Jackman is solid in Wolverine & Deadpool. Again, the role has that smell of an actor only agreeing to return if he gets a chance at pathos, but at least he isn’t coughing all the time. Jackson is fun to watch as he is mostly the straight man to Reynolds’s Deadpool. When Jackman does get dramatic, it is palatable. It doesn’t feel like he is going for an Oscar, merely an Emmy.
Deadpool & Deadpool
Which brings us to Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. Reynolds is the same as he always is. An impish superhero in tights who likes to murder his opponents in Kill Bill kind of ways. One either likes Reynolds or they don’t. Reynolds has basically become critic-proof. He is the equivalent of a franchise like James Bond, Friday the 13th or… Deadpool.
You know what you are getting with a Reynolds movie. If you don’t like it, it is your own fault for watching it.
As for me and my house, Reynolds amuses me. I enjoy his snappy, faux-offended comebacks. He also gets off zingers that show an awareness of many of the things we mock at The Last Movie Outpost. Reynolds knows his audience and makes a genuine attempt to entertain them.
Plus, Reynolds is now a billionaire, so if I don’t say nice things about him, he will hunt me for sport.
Deadpool & Wolverine & Plot
What is Deadpool & Wolverine about? Basically, Deadpool and Wolverine team up and do stuff together. It’s the standard buddy formula that almost always works. It is maybe most similar to the dynamic in 48 Hours, where you have a grizzled Nick Nolte and a mouthy Eddie Murphy.
Otherwise, there isn’t much to go into about the plot. I just saw the movie, and I’m not even really sure what it was about. Most everything in the film exists to send up comic book movies, not to tell a story. The Deadpool movies have become a genre unto themselves: gonzo deconstructions of comic book movies via the Zucker brothers…or something of that ilk.
It’s either your bag or it isn’t.
Probably where Deadpool & Wolverine suffers the most is that it lacks a good villain with a good plan to thwart. The villain and plan come off as afterthoughts.
Mostly, Deadpool & Wolverine gets by on throwing little surprises at the audience. Also, an after-credit scene happens. I appreciated how Deadpool & Wolverine went about this. The scene is not a hint for a sequel or a tease for a different movie in the Marvel Universe. It is simply a callback to a scene within the movie that came off as a Dan Ackroyd bit.
Summary
Ultimately, Deadpool & Wolverine is a very easy movie to rate. Is it as good as the first two? No. Is it amusing in spots? Sure. Is it entertaining at various moments? Sure. Yet, the movie’s lack of a good villain/challenge dings it a bit.
The movie also looks cheap. Perhaps, Marvel is pinching pennies at this stage. You won’t find any extravagant climaxes with blue lasers shooting into the sky here. You get gags instead, which is fine. Some of the gags certainly work better than a blue laser.
What do you get for the R-rating? Cartoon gore, a bunch of F-bombs, and some crude humor that doesn’t land that well. The theater was fairly packed, but the lewd stuff got no laughs.
Deadpool & Wolverine is mostly content to hang everything it has on having Reynold’s Deadpool share the screen with Jackman’s Wolverine, along with the friends they meet along the way. The movie doesn’t have the oddity of something like Longlegs to give it a boost. On the other hand, it is not as bland as Twisters.
Deadpool & Wolverine meet each other in the middle and earn a similar rating.
