'Deadpool & Wolverine' is a Victory Lap for Disney Adults

Self-awareness and self-aggrandizement collide in 'Deadpool & Wolverine,' an entertaining romp that elegizes the corporate division it dissolved.

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Marvel

At one point during Deadpool & Wolverine, my 11-year-old stepson leaned over and whispered, “why do they keep clapping every time new people show up?”

This came after about 20 solid minutes of cameos by superheroes from movies that came out well before he and his friends were born, followed by scattered applause and squeals from the comic-head opening night audience. It seemed to sum up the Deadpool & Wolverine experience. He and his friends loved it, even though they couldn’t possibly have understood half of it, a movie designed for the mythical 14-year-old who has somehow been reading Variety since 2002.

Deadpool and Wolverine have long belonged to Fox’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, a collection of Marvel characters long ago licensed to 20th Century Fox before Marvel started making their own movies, a situation that persisted until Disney (who owns Marvel) acquired Fox between 2017 and 2019. God forbid you not know any of this going into Deadpool & Wolverine, because it’s essentially the entire basis for the plot. At its heart this is a film that wants you to be thrilled about corporate consolidation (and the comic book adults, bless their hearts, actually are).

Now Deadpool (the “Merc with a Mouth,” played by human Soy Banter Delivery System Ryan Reynolds) and Wolverine (played vascularly by Hugh Jackman since 2000) can be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe! Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t shy about turning its commercial problem into a narrative one, with only the thinnest of fictional veils (but Deadpool is in on the joke!). In fact I can’t even remember what the justification actually was, just that Deadpool goes to Wolverine’s grave (it reminds us that Wolverine died at the end of Logan, released in 2017) to dig him up, in the hopes that he’s still alive. Only he’s not, and soon Deadpool is using Wolverine’s adamantine-plated skeleton like nunchucks to take out an army of henchman who have showed up from a portal to somewhere. (Iron Man 3 poked fun at the idea of henchman gleefully suiciding themselves at the hands of obviously superior superheroes 11 years ago, but even the supposedly self-aware Deadpool & Wolverine still takes the concept entirely at face value).

The corpse-desecration bit is kind of funny and the portal an obvious preamble for the sort of lazy, inevitable multi-verse plot that these superhero tie-in movies always require nowadays. And again, that’s sort of Deadpool & Wolverine in a nutshell: a smirking mask of affability and above-average jokes covering an ugly engine of forever churning corporate gears and sprockets. Don’t you love the corporate machine, children? It says “fuck” now!

Which is to say: the obvious problem for a massive, multi-character tie-in universe (I’m fairly certain there’s already a semi-official acronym for this) is that for there to be any tension, some of those characters have to die. And yet from a business perspective, they can’t die, because each character represents a piece of IP (intellectual property) and each one of those has value. So the obvious solution for characters who have to constantly die and regenerate is the multiverse, with its infinite timelines, in which characters can constantly die, be reborn, get killed again, be played by different actors, etc. Hugh Everett could never have imagined how useful his ideas about quantum mechanics would one day be to entertainment executives.

And so Deadpool & Wolverine does the multiverse, again. Marvel already pulled this same stunt in Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Tom Holland teaming up with past Spider-Men Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, and the multiverse has been a recurring theme of basically every Marvel, Marvel-adjacent, and Marvel-imitating movie since about 2018 or so. Yet Deadpool & Wolverine has to pretend that this is all a novel concept, mostly by making joke about how it’s not. The trouble with reusing the multiverse is basically the same trouble that requires the multiverse to exist as a plot device in the first place: with inifinite universes, none of the character deaths, or really anything that happens, really matters much. Because whatever happens here, there are still infinity minus one other iterations of these same people. The corporation decimates the individual, even in fiction.

Deadpool & Wolverine’s solution to all of these problems is basically to acknowledge them and make dirty jokes (certainly a gesture I can understand). And yet director Shawn Levy can’t seem to find a balance between necessary winking and just blanket referencing every single comic book movie released between 1998 and now, not to mention name dropping the actors’ spouses and their celebrity divorces (when Deadpool says “Blake,” he refers of course to Lively, Ryan Reynolds’ real-life wife). Shawn Levy feels like the malfunctioning T1000 being lowered into the lava in T2, spewing movie factoids from 2008 at random as he melts.

Yes, there are cameos and callbacks, some of which will inevitably surprise and possibly even delight you (and I mean specifically the “you” that has maybe been reading movie news for the past 17 years like I have), including a truly great one from a favorite personality from the FilmDrunk days that I won’t spoil here. It’s also so completist as to be not only exhausting but borderline pathological. And I’m blaming Levy specifically here (without including Deadpool & Wolverine’s five credited screenwriters) because he pulled the same shit at the end of Free Guy, which was shockingly good right up until the last 20 minutes or so that ruined it.

The plot is that Matthew McFayden from Succession shows up as Mr. Paradox, a rogue regional director of the TVA (the Time Variance Authority — there’s a thesis to be written about how real corporate entities like Disney spawn endless fictional ones like SHIELD, the TVA, etc, as narrative justification for commercial realities). There’s “trouble in Deadpool’s timeline,” (???) he explains, and so Paradox has tapped Deadpool to utilize a contraption called “the Time Ripper” to trim off this timeline in order to keep us all from going insane. Only Deadpool doesn’t want to (or something?) and so he steals a disgraced Wolverine from a different timeline to stop it. Paradox sends them both to “the Void” as punishment, a place where live all the forgotten superheroes and villains who never made the transition from the Fox Marvel Universe to the Marvel one (Juggernaut, Toad, Pyro, and Professor X’s sister, played by Emma Corrin).

I kept forgetting why Deadpool got sent there and what Paradox actually wanted to do, mostly because Deadpool & Wolverine has been designed far more as Easter egg scavenger hunt than story. My old podcasting partner Bret years ago described the psyche of the Marvel completist, the people who love to clap at the Stan Lee cameos and the Captain America shield showing up in Free Guy and whatnot, as “being able to categorize but not synthesize.” Never was there more perfect expression of this mindset than the 129 minutes that make up Deadpool & Wolverine.

I know everyone will inevitably think I’m a hater and a cynic for ripping on people for clapping at characters they recognize from other things (and I’m not entirely immune to the phenomenon, I laughed when *REDACTED* showed up too) and for bashing any comic book product ever, but I ended up enjoying the first two Deadpool movies much more than I thought I would have. The protagonist being able to say “shit, cum, greasy tits, cocaine, etc.” and Rob Delaney being there actually is a great device for making the exhaustive self-referentiality all comic book movies now require palatable. Deadpool was never truly subversive, but in counter-programming against the Marvel universe, it did have a winning back-of-the-classroom naughtiness to it. Deadpool was the guy making wanking motions during Marvel’s boardroom presentation. Being a bit of a boardroom wanker myself, again, I appreciated the gesture even when it was little too Reddit-y at times.

Deadpool & Wolverine attempts to take that attitude and apply it to the larger Marvel project, of promoting Marvel. Just like absolute power corrupts absolutely, Kevin Feige didn’t get to where he is by not sucking himself off every chance he gets. Such that when Deadpool tells Wolverine (or rather when Ryan Reynolds tells Hugh Jackman, the movie keeps blurring the distinction) “they’re going to have you making these movies until you’re 90,” it’s funny on the surface, but also a kind of mouth-full-of-blood laugh as it dawns on you that he’s probably right. It’s a well-constructed joke, but the kind that seems to be coming from the middle manager explaining why you have to work Saturdays now. (Sorry, you have to do Jeff’s job too now. It’s kind of hard to file TPS reports when you’re buried in my crawl space, ha ha ha!)

Marvel’s nauseating self-mythologizing continues apace even as Deadpool makes funny jokes about it (all three pre-teen boys I took with me made a point of saying how much they loved Ryan Reynolds on the car ride home) and Hugh Jackman acts his ass off. As the credits roll, Deadpool & Wolverine has the sheer audacity to needle drop Green Day’s “Time of Your Life,” set to accompany a montage of BTS footage from Hugh Jackman in X-Men, Jennifer Garner in Elektra, Ben Affleck in Daredevil, Ryan Reynolds in the first Deadpool — all of the forgotten superhero actors from the now-defunct Fox Marvel Cinematic Universe, having been subsumed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe which you, viewer, are now bankrolling.

Deadpool & Wolverine borrowed the format from Jackass Forever, in which it was genuinely affecting to see how much we had grown up with these lovably moronic skate bros who actually created the most enduring cultural phenomenon of 21st century suburbia. Only in this case it was more like WalMart elegizing some lesser-known smaller box store it put out of business. And I’m sorry, but you do not get to play the nostalgia card when you’re still the undisputed cultural hegemon.

It put me in mind of John Dolan’s review of A Million Little Pieces: “The rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.”

Or if you prefer a more recognizable meme, Don Draper’s rejoinder to Peggy’s plea for the respect of her peers in Mad Men: “That’s what the money is for!”

Grade: C+

(Take your kid to it — older than like 9, probably. They won’t get half of it but they’ll still love it because he says cuss words. It’s fine. Going to the movies is fun).