When the Marvel Cinematic Universe slammed down the blockbuster dunk of a decade with Avengers: Endgame, the studio behind it made an incredibly regrettable error that nearly undid everything that came before. It kept going.
The finality of what absolutely should’ve been the last Avengers film instantly got zapped out with a barrage of slop content meant to boost up a streaming service (except you, first season of Loki, you’re innocent) and mostly wayward films that couldn’t help but scream to you to come back next week before the sun even set on the end credits. And whatever the heck Eternals was.
The real Marvel Cinematic Universe successes post-2019 have been the final Guardians of the Galaxy film and the Sam Raimi Doctor Strange film, one the end of a standalone trilogy from a filmmaker that just bolted for the competition and the other a gleeful subversion that caught flak from some fans for daring to actually make any of this series morally complicated.
With declining box office receipts and lukewarm reviews, MCU head honcho Kevin Feige stares down the first real studio catastrophe in its existence, its strict adherence to minimal risk finally collapsing on shotty visual effects, radioactive storytelling and boredom out the wazoo. Sure, people ate up the Spider-Man movie with all the Spider-Men, but that wasn’t even the best Spider-Man movie of this decade (hey, Miles Morales).
The grandest irony is the best thing Feige has produced this decade came from trash heap he escaped at the beginning of his career and inherited from a bunch of nauseating studio merger nonsense: the Fox-Marvel-a-verse.
Watching Deadpool & Wolverine is like hanging out with that friend from high school who you always used to get in trouble with, felt you should maybe distance from once you got older and eventually relented to welcome back into your life because, in the end, the fun is just too good to miss out.
As much as you’d worry Feige’s suffocating corporate tidiness and cheeky PG “made you look” double entendres would swallow the Deadpool formula whole into something fitting the Disney affiliation, the “Merc with a Mouth” meta meat monsoon sweeps up the MCU into its most purely enjoyable project in half a decade.
For once, you actually feel like the studio is having fun with itself and trying to find some sense of hard-earned finality like James Gunn did with his final Guardians film instead of trying to pull the franchise like a Stretch Armstrong until the latex rubber pops and the gelled corn syrup gets everywhere.
Instead of trying to retcon a major character by saying he was an alien this whole time (see Invasion, Secret), Feige seemingly closes his eyes long enough to let Ryan Reynolds and his merry band of merciless marauders poke fun at how bad the MCU has been lately and try to argue that maybe treating happy endings like scabs to be picked off isn’t the best idea to respect your widely-beloved movie series.
The third Deadpool relishes in its spritely irreverence like it always has while still having the gall to tug at your heartstrings here and there, if only because the Marvel brand has become so ubiquitous in our culture and our memories. Even the most shameless cameo from 2005 makes you wince a little to let the nostalgia make you feel old and long for the simpler, stupider days of trashy superhero movies with Evanescence needle drops, television actors masquerading as movie stars and horrible computer graphics.
Deadpool & Wolverine feels like Costco-sized wish fulfillment for all the millennial fans of the Fox Marvel movies that seemed destined for the dumpster once Disney scarfed up their parent studio, as Hugh Jackman comes back once again as a variant of his take on Wolverine and the X-Men lore plays heavily into the plot. He’s splendid, as is the way the film weaves in Emma Corin’s evil Charles Xavier twin sister and all the ragtag characters from Fox Marvel’s past we wouldn’t dare spoil for you.
Indeed, there are countless Fox Marvel cameos to make the greying nerds yelp in celebration, but they’re not just shoehorned in for pandering satisfaction. The entire movie is a half-drunk, slap-happy eulogy to a time when you didn’t get the same dad gum superhero movie series multiple times a year and on your television streaming services, one where you could run from the heroes until you started to miss them again. It’s a film practically begging its cosmic overlords to let things die and honor their flawed accomplishments by refusing their exhumation for marketing opportunities.
The film does so by ignoring its own pleas with reckless abandon, the film’s opening scene such an aggressively garish disrespect to the emotional anchor weight of the Logan ending that it somehow does blindfolded backflips into unbelievable levels of endearment. By being so willing to do something positively grotesque with one of the great superhero finales ever, you feel the unabashed love and respect for why that ending is such a wallop in ways the MCU feels allergic to finding in its own movies. Bringing Jackman back feels so craven on paper, but Deadpool & Wolverine manages to do so earnestly without letting the parody of the decision fade fully into the background. There’s method to the madness.
In Feige’s world, you either refuse to take a joke or refuse to take it seriously, creating a tonally confusing vacuum where punchlines get strewn about like Legos on the carpet and generational emotional payoffs get undone a week later by multiverse nonsense. The Deadpool formula has no time for such tepid commitment, jumping butt-naked into its darkest, gut-busting vices and winningly brash, radio-pop soundtrack choices.
While it feels a bit self-defeating for a movie so passionately begging for the MCU to learn from its mistakes of oversaturation to be juxtaposed with Feige even vaguely discussing a world where the studio resurrects Robert Downey Jr.’s very, very dead Iron Man, you still appreciate Wade Wilson’s wisecracking wisdoms. His trolling is also deathly sincere, opposed to the cloying irony that has so often plagued these recent Marvel films when they’ve tried to be funny.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a very good X-Men movie, an absolutely hysterical Deadpool movie and probably the most daring MCU movie not directed by Gunn or Raimi since the first Black Panther. It’s also the anti-MCU movie, flipping through a dusty scrapbook from under the bed that reminds us unceasing uniformity never beats a fast food meal with a last, greasy bite.
After all the silly handwringing about Martin Scorsese correctly saying that the MCU films aren’t classical cinema, how delightful to finally get one of these movies that’s so comfortable in its identity as theme park fun that it gets much closer to a cinematic standard than any of its boring peers.
This isn’t Lawrence of Arabia, but it’s sure better than Ant-Man: Quantumania. Even Deadpool knows when it’s time to shut up and let someone else do the talking.
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