Deadpool & Wolverine is the most Gen X Superhero Movie Ever Made
It appeals directly to my sensibility!
As one of Deadpool & Wolverine’s several thousand postmodern, meta-textual flourishes, Ryan Reynolds’ sassy superhero Deadpool welcomes Hugh Jackman’s grim Wolverine to the MCU and says he’s entering at a low point.
The Merc with a Mouth is kidding on the square. Superhero movies have dominated pop culture for over a decade and a half since 2008’s Iron Man kicked off the MCU. We’ve had comic book movies up the wazoo. It’s seemingly been nothing but superheroes for as long as I can remember. People are sick of superhero movies. They’re exhausted. They need a long break.
Deadpool & Wolverine acknowledges this unfortunate reality many times, but that doesn’t make superhero movies any less overexposed.
Ant-Man and the WASP: Quantumania isn’t any better or worse than many late-period Marvel entries, but it nevertheless humiliated the MCU by grossing just under half a billion dollars at the world box office and being nominated for four Golden Raspberries.
Deadpool’s conception of himself as Marvel’s Jesus is tongue in cheek, but the rapscallion and his badass Canadian frenemy saved the MCU with a spectacularly successful superhero team-up movie that grossed just under a half billion dollars in its first week alone.
Deadpool and Wolverine is the most Gen X superhero movies. Deadpool is smart, sarcastic, nihilistic, and ironic, with a genius for breaking the fourth wall and post-modern shenanigans. Underneath the attitude and performative nihilism lies a core of blinkered idealism.
The blockbuster panders shamelessly and effectively to members of my generation with its attitude and soundtrack. Deadpool & Wolverine was made for people who recognize that the superhero isn’t just dancing to NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” early in the film; he’s doing the exact choreography of the music video as well.
The multi-tasking Marvel maniac channels the smooth moves of Justin Timberlake and the guys while lovingly destroying the bodies of anonymous henchmen with a brutality that ensures that this will be the first r-rated MCU movie in its first fifteen minutes alone.
Deadpool & Wolverine cynically but successfully exploits the cheap buzz of recognition that comes with knowing a comic book character, pop song, or comic book character who is introduced with a golden oldie.
In the third entry in the Deadpool trilogy, Deadpool wants to join the Avengers order to redeem a sinful existence and do something that matters. Wolverine is a tragic character, particularly in Logan.
Deadpool is also a tragic character, but he hides his pain behind a zany persona, jokes, and attitude. Reynolds plays Deadpool as an eighty percent wacky wisenheimer and twenty percent physically and mentally scarred survivor searching for meaning and purpose in an absurd and cruel universe.
Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, in sharp contrast, is eighty percent tragic anti-hero wrestling with a horrific past he can’t control or understand and twenty percent wisecracking smartass.
To save his timeline, Wade Wilson/Deadpool must retrieve an “anchor being” whose existence is crucial to the survival of a particular world. That anchor being is Jackman’s Wolverine.
Deadpool travels throughout the multiverse, encountering various iterations of the iconic Canadian before settling on what he is told is the very worst iteration of the character.
The anti-heroes beloved by juvenile delinquents and miscreants everywhere find themselves battling Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), an oily opportunist with an appetite for genocide, and Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), Charles Xavier’s supervillainous sister.
Deadpool and Wolverine end up in the Void, a no-man’s land where they encounter some unexpected allies—or at least they would be unexpected in a world with fewer superhero movies.
Deadpool & Wolverine is an MCU movie that pointlessly resurrects some of the least popular pre-MCU Marvel superheroes. I’m not sure what qualifies as a spoiler at this point, but I’m guessing y’all already know many, if not most, of the winking cameos here.
Part of what makes Deadpool & Wolverine such a strange proposition is that some of the winking cameos aren’t winking cameos at all but rather sizable supporting turns.
I’m not sure anyone in the world wanted Jennifer Garner’s Electra to return to the big screen, but here she is all the same. She’s joined in the void by Chris Evans as the Human Torch, Wesley Snipes as an AARP Blade, and finally, Channing Tatum as Remy Etienne LeBeau/Gambit.
Evans, Snipes, and Garner all played their characters before, in pre-MCU vehicles, but Tatum has been in talks to play Remy LeBeau/Gambit in a stand-alone film or X-Men movie.
The Tatum Gambit movie has spent an agonizing eternity in development hell for what appears to be a very good reason.
Remy LeBeau is not supposed to be Hugh Jackman in Logan. He’s not a serious, dour figure. As a superhero whose gift involves throwing cards fast enough to kill, Gambit is so ridiculous that he comes off as a gleeful parody of a spectacularly silly superhero rather than the real thing.
It’s a tricky tone that Tatum never nails. Tatum’s performance is not supposed to be good. Tatum is playing a raging Cajun with the world’s thickest, fakest accent. It’s hammy, silly, and over the top, particularly in terms of hair and costume, yet it’s never remotely as funny as it should be. Tatum’s performance is distractingly bad.
In a world where George Clooney pops at the end of a 200 million dollar superhero blockbuster as Bruce Wayne just for a laff, and Jamie Foxx inexplicably gets to play Electro a second time after humiliating himself with his Urkel-as-Supervillain turn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, unexpected choices for superhero cameos don’t have the potency they once did.
Bringing back an unpopular iteration of a popular character has become as much of an over-exposed cliche as the multiverse.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a film of delirious, deliberate excess. It’s devoted to overkill in the most literal and figurative fashion. It’s entirely too much: our battling buddies kill the bad guys with far more force than is necessary.
The third entry in the Deadpool series trafficks in giddy, gleeful ultra-violence. It makes a point of going too far. Director Shawn Levy really makes the most of the film’s hard R rating.
This review has been less than glowing because Deadpool and Wolverine has many obvious flaws, most endemic to late-period superhero movies. Yet, for the most part, I enjoyed it.
Reynolds and Jackman’s chemistry is strong. To put things in Ron Burgundy terms, Hugh Jackman returning as Wolverine is a big deal, particularly after Logan gave him one of the most satisfying endings in superhero cinema.
Jackman brings pathos to the proceedings. He grounds the action in a very relatable, human sense of guilt and sadness. The old man with the ridiculously ripped body has done things he will never forgive himself for. He’s seen things no one should see, things that have scarred him irrevocably.
Deadpool & Wolverine’s money shots are Wolverine and Deadpool fucking up their enemies or fighting each other. Nerds have waited decades to see Wolverine and Deadpool square off in a movie that isn’t X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
On that level, Deadpool & Wolverine does not disappoint. The MCU might have seen its better days. The superhero movie may be running on fumes, but this crowd-pleaser delivers. It breathes new life into a tired universe and makes up for X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Deadpool anoints himself the Marvel Jesus. That may be heretical, but it’s also true from a business standpoint, at least. With Deadpool and Wolverine, Marvel officially rises from the dead with boffo box office and deafening buzz.
Three and a half stars out of five
The "very worst iteration" of Wolverine?
Nice try, movie, but I was reading X-Men comics in the mid 1990s.