Deadpool and Wolverine movie review: Deadpool and Wolverine doesn’t want to be taken seriously, but it puts all its money, muscle and, because it’s Deadpool, into ensuring that you damn well do.
“I don’t want to just be a one-trick pony,” pleads Wade a.k.a Deadpool right at the start, when he is seeking to be included as an Avenger. What better than a one-trick pony? How about two, doing the one trick?
Deadpool & Wolverine has a problem. It so doesn’t want to be taken seriously, but it puts all its money, muscle and, because it’s Deadpool, into ensuring that you damn well do. Hence all the many, many asides at the Fox and Disney deal that made this all possible (really, who cares this much?), hence the meta Marvel references, hence the self-mocking tone, hence the gag about metaverse, and hence the full-on embrace of one, etc etc, even as our guys “save the universe (at least one timeline of it, or have I got that right?)”, and send some bad people to pretty awful deaths.
For the most part, despite its obsession with SEX by any other name but that, Deadpool & Wolverine is fun. Reynolds as Deadpool and Jackman as Logan a.k.a Wolverine bring opposite vibes, lonely personalities and nothing-to-lose swagger into some impressively mounted fights and, despite our better judgment, some good laughs. These include the opening sequence in which Deadpool uses bones of a decayed skeleton to slaughter a mini army, the times he clashes with Wolverine before the two team up, and one guiltily pleasurable clash inside a car that leaves it almost drowning in blood.
One very bad Cassandra Nova (a slithery, slippery, slick Corrin) reads minds by literally digging her fingers through them. It makes for very grand special effects, even in a franchise teeming with them.
However, one wonders what the stakes are when one hero (Wolverine) “regenerates” and the other (Deadpool) “can’t die”? Logan did actually die in a film by the same name, which gave him a satisfying farewell, but here he is again – summoned from a different timeline. So yeah, not only can’t Deadpool and Wolverine not die, even if they are dead, they can always be brought back if one is around long enough in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though it has taken some doing to get the two here.
Should we care then? Perhaps not. However, remember, Deadpool & Wolverine – which is really an addition to the weight-less Deadpool timeline, than the weighty X-Men one – is not supposed to let itself worry either way.
All it has to do is juggle some timelines, keep a string of “awww” cameos coming, in Deadpool’s case stuff in X-rated jokes and jabs at political correctness, in Wolverine’s case leer unabashedly at his biceps and “oily tits”, and then sprinkle that Marvel studio dust all over.
All we have to do is show up.
