Deadpool and Wolverine - Review

I have never met a sadder, more attention-starved jabbering little prick in my entire life.

1/10

Look, I’m not going to beat around the bush, this movie is so confoundingly bad that it got me to write for this blog again. Eight months of writer’s block, this is all it took! I didn’t even publish my best of 2023 list. I promise I was working on it. Oh well.

Deadpool & Wolverine, baby. This is the good stuff, the stuff we used to be so ready to tear apart on Film Twitter back in the early days of Phase Four MCU. A movie so lazy and yet so costly you feel like you’ve been punked for buying a ticket to see it. But like with Spider-Man: No Way Home, I find this movie more confusing than I do outright terrible. I mean, it is bad in a lot of ways, but the thing I’m stuck on the most is how anyone gets anything out of this. If I had to picture somebody who enjoys this - well, I don’t have to, do I? They’re everywhere, this movie is gonna make a billion dollars, that has to come from somewhere. I have to acknowledge that someone, somewhere out there, thinks this is bonafide good shit. If the guy behind my shoulder at the theater is any indication, the brazenness of it is part of the charm. There is an admirable quality to the “kill your darlings” nature of the film’s relationship with the icon that is Wolverine and the hurdle that is Logan. Starting the film by having Deadpool dig up Logan’s skeleton and use it to beat up a bunch of time cops is funny, I gotta hand it to them. It’s the only time it feels like a comedic scene has been constructed and normal drama is interrupted by Deadpool’s tireless tongue.

That’s my biggest problem with Deadpool as a concept, really. Deadpool is theoretically funny, and I’m not going to get too deep into the comics because I haven’t ready any Deadpool comics, I don’t care that much. But a guy who knows he’s inside of a superhero movie is a fun idea. I remember liking a lot of the first movie, especially the odd romantic comedy genre fusion it was going for. It feels like it was made for somebody, the second one does too! But this one feels like it was made for frankly the worst type of audience member, people online who are still bitter about the same old shit from the history of this genre on the screen. People who have been “inconvenienced” in some type of way by things going down the way they did, artists making art that starts and ends. Matthew McFadyen’s villain is, metatextually, a guy who is wrong because he wants the story of Deadpool to be over. It feels simultaneously producer-brained and furiously yanking at fan forum wishing bones, all the while Ryan Reynolds get to be the most Ryan Reynolds he’s ever been in these movies.

It all feels like someone insisting that they know better than the art that came before it. That the art of our past is inconvenient to the product of our present. We have to desecrate Logan so that we can justify bringing Wolverine back. Remember when remakes were a thing for these movies? Now that this is all television, it all has to be one big story with one big continuity. Any other previous interpretation that gets in the way has to get enveloped into this tired multiverse concept, which the movie wants to make fun of while wholeheartedly advocating for it as a solution to all problems that Marvel Studios may face in the future of getting butts in seats.

Every aesthetic choice in this movie feels like it was made to piss me off. I was complimenting this earlier, but the opening scene is immediately deflated by its horrible editing when Deadpool is actually fighting. The stylized opening credits I don’t mind, the intercutting with dancing to “Bye Bye Bye” is what really distracts me from enjoying what should be a perfectly good action scene. The joke is already there, and you ruin it by making a second joke about how “ha ha isn’t it funny seeing this cool superhero dance to NSYNC?” No! It’s not! Get back to killing time cops please! The editing in these action scenes is all around awful. You can barely make out what’s happening as SPOILER reveals his powers to Deadpool, a giant second-act brawl is blindingly endless in its quick cuts and reckless abandon of basic cut to cut continuity, and a daring one take shits the bed by having just a little too much going on so it becomes impossible to follow with the eye. In short, it’s fan film stuff. It’s everything wrong with the big fan films of the YouTube era, only it costs more than all of those combined.

I gestured at the story before, but I’ll expand on it and the writing a bit: it’s bad. Mr. Paradox says he’s going to destroy Deadpool’s universe because his Wolverine (who’s never been seen or mentioned previously but is, apparently, the one from Logan and the preceding X-films) died, the entire universe will eventually collapse because Logan was the “anchor being,” the thing literally holding the universe together. This is a new concept for the MCU, similar to the “canon events” of Across the Spider-Verse, only more ridiculous and less important in the grand scheme of things. It’s such a straightforwardly ubermenschian idea that Alan Moore must be chuckling at how right he was at this genre’s creeping towards fascist belief systems towards its power structures. The jokes are often bad, but this is not really my kind of humor to begin with, so that doesn’t really bother me. What does bother me is the bump up in weird homophobic and ableist humor, and Deadpool worrying that “the woke mob” will “cancel” the movie, as if he’s seen the constant tweets from people who have no concept of demographic or bias, about people complaining about other people “turning” on MCU movies a few months after they come out and it trying to get ahead of the curve. It also feels like it’s been cut down severely to make a two hour runtime, where pacing could’ve been spent better on establishing a certain collective of characters that are important to the third act, or adding in what seemed to be another time cop brawl that was cut for time. Perhaps the latter was scrapped in favor of the third act big fight scene that’s still here, but why not do both? Too much action in your action movie? God forbid!

More and more I feel completely disconnected from this sector of culture. I don’t get what it does for people who aren’t nerds and I’m sick of arguing with people on the internet about the validity of liking it. It feels like making fun of people who only watch NCIS at this point. But it wouldn’t be so bad if the MCU fans didn’t constantly act like petulant children online when anyone, from a rando they see on their timeline to big film institutions, want to draw attention to anything else. So, my intended takeaway for you is this. Don’t watch this movie. Use your time to see literally anything else that’s in theaters right now. Watch something on the Criterion channel or MUBI or whatever else you have access to. Watch something that makes you happy, watch something that moves you! And if that’s Deadpool & Wolverine, that’s fine too! I’m sorry you read all this bitching about it if that’s you! Just, do something valuable with your time. Writing this review is me doing that for myself. So thank you for sharing that with me.

I’m not making any promises that this blog is fully back in the swing of things, so this will be a freebie. But if you’re liking what you’re reading here, please consider subscribing or reading my other works. Thanks.