Josh Reviews Deadpool & Wolverine

After Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, many Marvel fans, like I was, were thrilled that so many of the Marvel characters were finally back under one roof.  I was over the moon excited (and I still am!) to see the Fantastic Four and the X-Men brought into the MCU.  But fans had questions as to what this would mean for Deadpool.  A bright light in the later-day Fox X-Men universe movies, the first two Deadpool movies were raunchy R-rated affairs that didn’t feel like they meshed with Disney’s family-friendly vibe.  Would they ever make any more Deadpool movies?  Would they have their rough edges sawed off to fit with a PG or PG-13 rating?  Would Deadpool really ever actually fit into the MCU?

It took a while for us to get answers to those questions, but in the end I don’t think I could be much happier with what we got.  Deadpool & Wolverine has the quality, attention to detail, and love for the characters that characterizes the MCU under Kevin Feige.  The film allows Deadpool to interact with the MCU without abandoning the Fox universe where he originated.  (Quite the contrary: I was shocked by the degree to which this film was a love letter to all of the Fox superhero movies!!)  It’s also, thankfully, still R-rated and full of ultra-violence and over-the-top profanity.

I loved it.  It’s not perfect.  I think the character arcs are flatter than I’d hoped, and there are aspects of the plot that make absolutely zero sense.  But the film is a heck of a good time in a movie theater.  It’s terrific fun, filled with to the brim with jokes and fun references and connections.  It’s unquestionably juvenile, but so too were the first two Deadpool movies.  (Click here for my review of Deadpool and here for my review of Deadpool 2.)

The main reason the movie works is because of the pairing of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.  Many before me have written about the incredible act of will it took for Ryan Reynolds — who played an awful, totally wrong version of Deadpool in the abominable X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie — to get a second chance to get the character right, and to do it so well.  The jokey, profane Deadpool isn’t my favorite superhero character — frankly, this sort of character isn’t really what I’m looking for in a superhero movie — but there’s no denying how perfectly Mr. Reynolds embodies the role.  And I’ll admit, the joy Mr. Reynolds clearly is having while playing this character is contagious.  I can’t help but like this character.  This demented Bugs Bunny creature is fun to watch on-screen.

Mr. Reynolds had long joked about wanting Wolverine in a Deadpool movie.  (The previous two Deadpool movies only included grade-C X-Men characters.)  I can’t believe he finally got his wish!!  It’s a pleasure to see Hugh Jackman back playing Wolverine.  He was perfect as Wolverine ever since his first second on-screen in 2000’s X-Men, and I’ve always loved his version of this character, even when the movies he was in weren’t quite up to snuff.  He gave his version of Wolverine quite a definitive end back in 2017’s Logan, but I’m perfectly happy to see Mr. Jackman back in the role.  Impressively, he can still pull off Wolverine’s physicality, almost twenty-five years after he first played the character!  Deadpool describes Wolverine as “THE X-Man” at one point in the film; the same could definitely be said for Hugh Jackman.  It’s simply joyous for me to see him back as Wolverine.  Watching Deadpool annoy Wolverine was never not funny to me.  Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Jackman have great chemistry on-screen together.  The film really sings when they’re together.

(The charisma of both actors helps paper over the script’s weaknesses.  Deadpool has basically the same arc he had in Deadpool 2, annoying but gradually winning over a gruff, violent older mutant hero.  Wolverine, meanwhile, has basically the same arc he has in Logan, being wracked with guilt for allowing the X-Men to die.  I wish the screenwriters had found something new for either of the two main characters to play!!)

Shall we dive into the film?  Beware SPOILERS ahead!!  Don’t read on if you haven’t yet seen the film — I’d hate to spoil any of the fun surprises.

The biggest surprise in the film for me was that Deadpool didn’t wind up in the MCU at the end!!!  I was sure that’s where this story was going, and I was shocked (though not unhappy) to be wrong!

I was overjoyed to see Deadpool interacting with the TVA (introduced in Loki).  That was very cool, and a great way to quickly establish the idea that Deadpool’s universe from his first two movies was a separate strand of the multiverse from the “sacred timeline” of the MCU.  I love the TVA, and I loved seeing them cross over into an MCU movie.  (In fact, I love the TVA so much that it made me sort of hate the opening credits, in which Deadpool brutally murders a bunch of TVA agents.  Later in the film we understand that they’re working for Mr. Paradox, so I guess they’re bad guys, which made me feel a little better about it… though I still feel bad, because I can’t forget that Loki established that these TVA dudes are all just variants.)

I loved Matthew Macfadyen (MI-5, Death at a Funeral) as Mr. Paradox!  I thoroughly enjoyed his off-the wall villain.  I thought he was very funny.  I’d love to see him again.  I was happy to see Hunter B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) back from Loki, though I wish she had more to do.

The whole business of Deadpool’s being “Marvel Jesus” was very funny, though I wish the film actually explained WHY Mr. Paradox wanted Deadpool to work with the TVA in the first place.  They say Deadpool is going to be important in the future (and we see that funny clip of Thor crying over his dead body), but that’s a frustrating non-answer.  (It’s particularly annoying because this film’s story does something that always bothers me, which is the villain would have won if he’d just left things alone.  Meaning that if Mr. Paradox just left Deadpool alone in his universe, Deadpool would have never known about Paradox’s evil plan.  It’s only Mr. Paradox’s own actions, bringing Deadpool to the TVA, that allow Deadpool to get wise to what he’s doing.  So why did Mr. Paradox bring Deadpool to the TVA??  There’s no reason given in the film.)

Speaking of the multiverse and the MCU… like I said above, I’d thought the film would wind up with Deadpool in the MCU.  I was surprised and confused when, very early in the film, Deadpool seems able to cross into the MCU with no trouble, for the scene with Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau).  That was a funny scene, but it totally threw me out of the movie, because I had no idea how Deadpool crossed into the MCU!!  That should have been a huge deal, the climax of the film, in my opinion.  Instead, Deadpool does it with no trouble, which sort of undermines the whole thing (including his excitement a few scenes later when Mr. Paradox recruits him to the TVA with the prospect of joining the MCU).

Although the film does spent a chunk of time in Deadpool’s universe (which is quickly established as being different from the MCU), most of the characters from Deadpool’s previous movies are relegated to very brief cameos.  Colossus (voiced by Stefan Kapičić), Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna), and Dopinder (Karan Soni) have a handful of lines but that’s it.  It’s nice to see them, though it’d have been fun had they had more to do.  (Maybe if we saw them in jeopardy in the third act that’d have given the threat of the annihilation of Deadpool’s home universe more weight.)  They did give Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) some funny moments, which was good.  I was happy to see Morena Baccarin back as Vanessa, though bummed that this film repeated the mistake of Deadpool 2 in quickly writing her out of the story.  Why can’t these writers come up with something for Vanessa to do?  Why are Wade and Vanessa broken up at the start of this film?  (That doesn’t track for me, after all that Wade went through in Deadpool 2 to get her back.  It felt like a writerly excuse to give Wade some angst at the start of the story… but why did we need that? His separation from Vanessa doesn’t wind up playing into the story of the film at all.)

On the other hand, I was BOWLED OVER by the many actors from the various Fox superhero movies that this film brought back.  After Spider-Man: No Way Home resurrected and brought closure to characters from both previous iterations of the Spider-Man film series (led by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield), Deadpool & Wolverine surprised me by setting out to do the same with characters from across the Fox films!!  This was a big surprise, and a lot of fun.  Now, I will be up front and say this film is not as successful at giving all of these characters satisfying and complete character arcs, which No Way Home miraculously did so well.  The characters are flatter here.  BUT I still found it a huge amount of fun to see these characters brought back, with such love and such admirable desire to give them a better ending to their stories than they ever got in their mostly-awful Fox movies.

Let’s start with Chris Evans, who finally did what I’d been hoping would happen ever since Marvel started playing around with multiverse stories.  He returned, not as Steve Rogers, but as Johnny Storm from the Fantastic Four!!  (Before he was Captain America, Mr. Evans played Johnny in the two Fox Fantastic Four movies.)  What a pleasure to see Mr. Evans back as Johnny!!  I loved every minute of it.  (Including his gruesome death, and his hilarious post-credits scene, one of the best Marvel post-credits scenes in years.)

I’d expected we’d see Dafne Keen back (from Logan) as X-21.  I was happy to see her again.  Ms. Keen is a terrific actress (she was the best thing in the disappointing His Dark Materials TV adaptation, and I loved her in The Acolyte).  I liked seeing her back in the mix.  She had a few nice moments with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.  I was NOT expecting to also see Jennifer Garner as Elektra, Wesley Snipes as Blade, and Channing Tatum as Gambit!!!  It was so fun to see these characters brought back.  Jennifer Garner was terrific in the 2003 Daredevil movie (a film which I defend; it’s not perfect, but it’s a solid film and one of the best of the Fox Marvel movies), though the spin-off Elektra movie was abyssmal.  I loved seeing Ms. Garner back as Elektra, that was wonderful.  (The Ben Affleck joke worked.)  I actually have no attachment to Blade, and I have never seen any of the three films Wesley Snipes made in the late nineties & early aughts, but I know the success of the first Blade was a key building block in today’s modern superhero movie era, so I thought it was cool they brought him back.  (Especially since the MCU Blade reboot seems to be stuck in development hell, a fact the film addresses in a great Deadpool-looks-right-in-the-camera moment.)  But Channing Tatum as Gambit???  That was amazing.  Mr. Tatum, famously, was annouced as Gambit, but his movie never got made by Fox.  It was a hoot to see Mr. Tatum, rocking a classic-looking Gambit costume, and speaking in cajun gibberish.  I loved it.

I loved the choice to bring back Aaron Stanford as Pyro.  He was a wonderful character in X2, where he started going down an Anakin Skywalker path… but the disappointing X-Men: United didn’t do much with him, and then we never saw him again.  This was a character in need of a proper ending, so it was great to bring him back.  I do wish this film had done more with him, or given his character a little more depth.  It was great to see him, but this still wasn’t quite the satisfying conclusion to his character arc that I’d been hoping for.

I wrote above that most of the Deadpool characters were shunted aside.  The one notable exception was Rob Delaney (Catastrophe) as Peter.  I love that this film seemed to love Peter as much as I did!!  Mr. Delaney is enormously funny, and watching him become a sort of jolly multiversal Nick Fury type was incredible.  (The gross visual gag of his tight-fitting costume towards the end was a juvenile touch I could have happily avoided, though.)

I was intrigued that the film chose to use Cassandra Nova as the villain.  Emma Corrin was magnificent in the role, perfectly embodying the character from the comics.  And wow, between Corrin’s own physicality and the dead-perfect comics-accurate costume, Cassandra looked 100% correct.  I loved her.  BUT, using this character was a weird choice.  Separating Cassandra from her twin brother Charles Xavier feels like a big missed opportunity to me.  Why use her in a movie without Professor X?  I didn’t feel like she really belonged in this Deadpool movie.  It feels like this villain could almost have been anyone, which is a weakness of the script and story, I think.  (But I loved that she lived inside a corpse of Giant Man, though!!)

Other thoughts:

• There are some great fights in this film.  I particularly enjoyed the Deadpool vs Wolverine fight inside a car.
• I was happy to see Tyler Mane reprise his role from the first X-Men film as Sabretooth.
• For a film that was so in love with the Fox movies, I’m a little surprised there weren’t more X-Men characters in the film.  Are they saving those actors for Secret Wars?  It’d have been nice to have actually gotten to see the death of the X-Men in this Wolverine’s timeline depicted on screen, as opposed to just talked about.
• My comic-book nerd heart was full seeing all the alternate-universe Wolverines taken from famous comic-book story-lines: the Age of Apocalypse, Patch, Marc Silvestri’s cover to Uncanny X-Men #251 (with Wolvie crucified on a big X), and more.  I also loved seeing what a Wolverine who was actually as short as he’s supposed to be in the comics would look like in a movie.  That was a funny joke.
• I also loved the Henry Cavill version of Wolverine!
• I enjoyed Ryan Reynolds’ depiction of Nice-pool.  I also smiled hearing Blake Lively’s voice as Lady Deadpool.  (Ms. Lively is married to Ryan Reynolds.)
• It was nice seeing Wolverine in his classic yellow and blue superhero outfit, finally!  It looked great.  It was a huge surprise to also see the classic Wolverine cowl in the film’s third act!!  That was fun, though I don’t think they quite got that perfect.  It looked just a little bit off.  Maybe it’s the animated white eyes that didn’t quite work?
• Personally, I’ve always preferred Wolverine’s brown outfit from the eighties over the yellow-and-blue duds, so I was thrilled that outfit also got a shout-out in the movie!!  (Along with a mention of John Byrne, one of my all-time favorite comic book artists, who illustrated The Dark Phoenix Saga and Days of Future Past, among many other classic X-Men stories.)
• I loved seeing the limbo area from Loki used in the movie… including the smoke-dragon Alioth!!  That’s a great deep cut from Loki!!  I laughed to see the Twentieth Century Fox logo in the limbo area.

I had a lot of fun watching Deadpool & Wolverine!  It’s not perfect, but it’s thoroughly enjoyable.  After some recent stumbles, I’m glad to see Marvel Studios back with a movie that’s well-made and also a box-office success.  I hope it’s not too long before we see both Daredevil and Wolverine back again!  Will they be in Secret Wars?  Is the reason the joke about Marvel making Hugh Jackman play Wolverine into his nineties so funny because it’s not far from the truth??  Whatever the case, I’m so glad they were able to mix Deadpool and the MCU while still preserving all the elements of the Deadpool character and movies, including the R rating.  I’m excited for what’s next…

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