Is It Wrong to Enjoy "Deadpool & Wolverine"?
At what point do movies stop being movies?
Superhero cinema wasn’t always this powerful. Back in 2000, the success of a movie like, say, X-Men—Bryan Singer’s original adaptation of Stan Lee’s mutant comic book series—wasn’t guaranteed. The film didn’t have twenty-five years of genre dominance to back it up, and didn’t depend on that dominance for success. After all, it wasn’t until very recently that movies became the risk-averse industry they are today; back in 2000, something like X-Men couldn’t have made money unless it was entertaining on its own merits—if not outrightly Good. And it was good—good enough, at least, to pull over $300 million globally on a $75 million budget. This wasn’t because audiences were possessed of an undying love for the original comic series (although that did undoubtedly play some role), but rather because it was just a fun time at the movies. There were interesting characters, entertaining action setpieces, and an unreasonably good performance from Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (a character he would go on to play until the present day), and that was enough to earn the price of a movie ticket.
Nobody knew it then, but X-Men kickstarted an era of oddball genre experimentation (at least compared to today), with a series of studio-backed superhero movies that ran the gamut of runaway successes like X-Men or Spider-Man 2 (2002), noble failures like Hulk (2003), and the unabashed dumpster fire of Daredevil (2003). The majority of the movies that came out during this time were quite poor (you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone still defending something as ignoble as 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer). But compared to the present, when a fixed-recipe method of filmmaking creates products that play directly to audience pleasure centers, there’s something retrospectively endearing about this era of bad-to-decent superhero flicks. They may have been bad, but they were authentically bad: failures from incompetent human beings, rather than sociopathic corporations.
The superhero cinema that we know today is an all-consuming beast, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe at its center. Having cornered the market so intensely and for so long, audiences have been bludgeoned into superhero submission: Today, even the most disinterested moviegoer could tell you the difference between Batman and Iron Man, which of those two characters belongs to Marvel and which to DC, and which of those two publishers is owned by The Walt Disney Corporation. No human being should have to be aware of such levels of corporate knowledge (except, perhaps, for dweebs who write movie review Substacks). But such is the gobbling effect that comes from the one-two punch of overwhelming box-office numbers and corporate consolidation.
Dominance does not mean quality, however, and it isn’t controversial to observe that the MCU is at a bit of a low point (and not just because Deadpool said those exact words in the blockbuster I’m about to discuss). Marvel has increasingly relied upon celebrity cameos and empty nostalgia ploys for their profit margins, leading to miss after miss after miss, and contributing to the overall feeling of an MCU in decline. This is not to say that their strategy isn’t working. Despite recent duds, Marvel’s economic woes are not so terrible as people claim, and suggests that their play-the-hits strategy is working at the box office.
This is not the same thing as saying that the MCU is good, however, and I won’t pretend to hide my anger toward it. I blame Marvel for many of the issues plaguing cinema of the 2020s; they have taken enough money from enough pockets for enough years by feeding us an enervating substance that degrades over time. The MCU has become a creature so corrupted by its own greed and avarice that it no longer resembles the middlebrow risk-taker it once was—a snake eating its own tail. The days of X-Men are long gone.
“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” said Harvey Dent in the movie that kicked off the other superhero mega-franchise of the past twenty-five years. Sixteen years after it began, and the MCU has become the villain, never exemplified better than in Deadpool & Wolverine: The third entry in the Deadpool franchise, the 34th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and now the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. On the one hand a genuinely funny burlesque of the superhero movies and the corporate machinations that undergird them, and on the other hand the most deplorable garbage I have ever seen in my entire life, Deadpool & Wolverine is a strange, strange blend of cynicisms, and whose qualities I am still struggling to parse more than six weeks after leaving the theater.
To begin, on a purely technical basis, Deadpool & Wolverine is awful. The script is uninspired and shallow; the film’s characters are lifeless and mechanical; the visuals are somehow both drab and vomit-inducing simultaneously—yet another movie beset by Marvel’s pixel-fucked drudgery.
But you don’t need to go nearly that far down the critical rabbit hole to question why the film exists in the first place. Deadpool & Wolverine is the result of Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox: a corporate merger of blockbuster proportions. In it, Disney gained IP rights over a number of fan-favorite Marvel characters that it previously did not, most important of which include the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and Deadpool (each of whom now have their own MCU film in development). The merger cost Disney approximately $71.3 billion: a hefty sum, and one that necessitated immediate box-office turnaround. Disney being Disney—a company that has learned a thing or two over its years of remakes, legacyquels, and other billion-dollar exercises in nostalgia porn—knew that the best way to remove its debt was to pit two long-loved superheroes against each other.
And what better heroes than Deadpool and Wolverine? Being two of the most popular Marvel characters yet to make an appearance in the MCU proper, their selection was a no-brainer. None of this takes into account the problem of James Mangold’s Logan (2017), a film that (apart from being a masterful demythologization of the superhero genre) also marked the moment in which Wolverine dies. Hugh Jackman retired the role after seventeen years of rigorous superherodom, and while “retirement” is a pretty loose phrase in an age when Robert Downey Jr. can be wooed back to the MCU with a ripe $100 million payday, Wolverine’s death always felt different, not least because Logan remains one of the few superhero films that manages to transcend its genre trappings. It took itself seriously enough that it earned our emotional investment, enough that when Logan laid down in his X-marked grave, it felt like it meant something.
Therefore: “How are we gonna do this without dishonoring Logan’s memory?” asks Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the foul-mouthed, fourth wall-breaking antihero in the opening minutes of Deadpool & Wolverine, the movie that dishonors Logan’s memory by virtue of its title. “I’ll tell you how,” responds Deadpool: “We’re not,” and thus commences a setpiece in which Deadpool exhumes Logan’s skeleton, picks apart his bones, and sticks them directly into the eyes of the bad guys convening on his location.
To say that this sequence is offensive would be beyond obvious: the offensiveness is exactly the point, and Deadpool’s self-satisfied nods to the camera only confirms the film’s obnoxious, self-aware sense of teenaged humor. But at the same time—and much as it pains me to admit—I’d be lying if I said I didn’t laugh. The violence is choregraphed to the tune of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye,” with blood spurting out of skulls at each utterance of the word “Bye”; in the background, Deadpool jumps around to JT’s original dance moves. It’s insistently annoying, yet it’s also perversely pleasurable: there is enjoyment to be had in watching Ryan Reynolds dismember the remains of 20th Century Studios with R-rated glee. As hard as it is to shake the feeling that good filmmaking is being desecrated at the expense of a good paycheck, it’s equally hard to deny that I found myself laughing more often than I wasn’t.
But then again: this movie is not well made. The plot is an unforgivably convoluted mess. Following from the first two Deadpool movies, Wade Wilson (Deadpool’s layman alter ego) has retired the mask to work a life as a used car salesman—a boring, despondent life that is quickly upended when Time Variance Authority (a time-keeping corporate bureaucracy introduced in the Disney+ show Loki) whisk him away from his reality to introduce him to Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, relishing his post-Succession career), who explains that Wade’s universe is deteriorating because his universe’s “anchor being”—i.e. a person of such importance that their death causes the destruction of their universe—has died. That person was Wolverine, and Mr. Paradox—whose job it is to oversee the death of Wade/Wolverine’s universe—impatiently offers Wade the option of abandoning his dying Fox universe to join the MCU (thus speeding up his universe-destruction assignment). But Wade doesn’t want to throw his universe out with the bathwater, so he rejects Mr. Paradox’s offer, punches him in the nose, and embarks on a mission to replace his universe’s dead Wolverine with one from another world.
This setup is all basically one big meta-joke, with Mr. Paradox standing in for a Walt Disney Corporation eager to reboot of its recently-acquired X-Men franchise, whose quality completely fell off once Jackman left the series in 2017. While that concept is at least mildly amusing, the overwrought nature of its execution left me exhausted—if you didn’t get a migraine reading the paragraph above, know that I had one writing it, and know that I was close to screaming with a Jesse Pinkman-esque furor (“[The MCU] can’t keep getting away with this!”) at the thought that Marvel will feed us bullshit plotting for the rest of our days.
And while I certainly came close to disrupting the experiences of my packed opening-night theater, Deadpool & Wolverine hit me with such a nonstop barrage of jokes that I was bludgeoned into submission. The movie has a sense of humor endearing enough to quell my anger, as in a great montage early into the film in which Wade searches for different varieties of Wolverine across mulitple universes. He finds a five-foot-two Wolverine; a Wolverine dressed as James Bond; a Wolverine played not by Hugh Jackman, but by Henry Cavill (“The Cavillrine”), each well-designed to the genre that they are lampooning.
The comedy works continuously to keep your interest throughout the film, but it isn’t enough. Deadpool & Wolverine is beset by a number of cringe-inducing attempts at sincerity; we are suddenly
Out of the fog of fourth-wall-breaks and penis humor, we are suddenly asked to invest in the relationship between Wade and his fiancée Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), or between Wade and his group of X-Men friends. These moments are awful, not just because it’s impossible to take seriously a superhero who calls himself “Marvel Jesus”, but because director Shawn Levy couldn’t direct authentic human emotion to save his life. Rather than trust the intelligence of his audience, Levy bangs us over the head with signposted dialogue and obvious music cues, contributing to the sense of a film that wants to string you along until the next joke, rather than envelop you in a story.
The previous Deadpool movies struggled with this too. It was frustrating whenever directors Tim Miller and David Leitch asked us to invest in Wade’s relationship with anyone besides himself, particularly because the rest of the runtime was filled with humor aimed exclusively at 13-year-old males. But there was a charm to those first two Deadpool movies that nullified some of their obnoxiousness; they were considered supehrero underdogs at the time, the first film pulling $781 million globally on a (comparatively miniscule) budget of $58 million. Those low-stakes numbers were likewise reflected in second-rate cameos and scuzzy filmmaking style that were well-suited to Deadpool, an anti-hero who punched up to corporate overlords who wouldn’t pay up for a better X-Man.
With a $200 million budget and the full weight of the Disney banner behind it, Deadpool & Wolverine has lost its underdog edge. There is comedy to spare, but without the anti-establishment credibility of its predecessors, Deadpool & Wolverine reveals itself for what it already was: a lackluster blend of postmodern self-awareness, shoddy plot mechanics, and empty variations on the same dick joke.
And yet: As I sat in the theater, these moral objections ringing through my head, the hard facts remained: I was laughing. Consistently.
Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine’s blend of dick jokes and postmodern self-awareness is juvenile (or unethical, depending on who you ask), but I’d be wrong to deny that I chuckled when Deadpool quips on Disney forcing Jackman to play Wolverine “until he’s 90,” or when Deadpool notes that cocaine is “the one thing Feige said was off limits,” or when he smashes his head directly into the camera and tells Fox that they can suck it—he’s going to Disneyland.
80% of Deadpool & Wolverine involves Ryan Reynolds making self-referential gags directly to camera. It’s lazy, amateurish filmmaking, but it got me to laugh. It begs the question: If a movie is badly made, but you’re laughing all the while—well, shouldn’t that be enough?
Hard to say. Like the first two films in the series, Deadpool & Wolverine takes apart the superhero genre with a self-referential sledgehammer that takes its aim at well-worn tropes like superhero landings and bullet countdowns. This third entry does much the same, the key difference being that where Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were parodizing superhero cinema at its cultural and artistic peak, D&W was made under the auspices of corporate consolidation. The jokes have thus shifted their focus from tropes to CEOs. (There’s a particular emphasis on the death of 20th Century Fox, as with a great sight gag in which a replica of the 20th Century Fox logo lies in decay amid the ruins of other forgotten superhero characters.)
The byproduct is that Levy has stuffed (and I mean stuffed) the film with celebrity cameos. The bulk of the film takes place in The Void—a garbage-patch universe to which Deadpool and an alt-universe Wolverine (this one drunk and despondent, having failed to save his own world from destruction) get shunted early on, and the main excuse to bring back a multitude of Fox-era superhero performers that the world has since forgotten. The presence of Jennifer Garner and Wesley Snipes—who show up to reprise their title roles from Elektra and the Blade franchise, two generally terrible enterprises that Deadpool & Wolverine thankfully treats with knowing laughter, rather than shrieking nostalgia—are miraculously entertaining because the film recognizes that these shitty franchises were, in fact, shitty. There are no preconceptions about these movies being anything other than bad—a refreshing attitude that transforms what should have been embarassing cosplay acts into good-natured fun.
Other cameos include a tremendously funny turn from Channing Tatum as Gambit, the card-wielding X-Man whose solo movie Tatum long tried to get off the ground, and who here plays him with Cajun accent so uproariously bad, it comes close to redeeming all of Deadpool & Wolverine’s worst qualities. Similar things can be said of Chris Evans, who shows up not as Captain America but as Johnny Storm from the terrible Fantastic Four (2005)—a marvelous bait-and-switch for fanboys expecting the return of Steve Rogers.
It’s worth mentioning that Hugh Jackman’s appearance as Wolverine is almost a cameo unto itself. Despite his name being on the masthead, his character is tremendously weak, with a tragic backstory that the film seems eager to dispel from our minds. Jackman does unreasonably good work elevating a nothing role into something resembling gravitas, but Deadpool & Wolverine itself isn’t the slightest bit interested in his character. It prefers to keep him a vessel of fanboy pleasure, rather than an individual with wants and needs. (Cue Deadpool’s self-satisfied winks to the audience, followed by a dick joke: “Get your special sock out, nerds. It’s gonna get good!”)
There’s a degree of forgivability to shoehorning Wolverine into a Deadpool movie—if you were to commit the sin of dishonoring Logan, it might as well be here, where Disney’s nothing-matters-because-it’s-the-multiverse shtick is at least woven into the fabric of the film itself. But as I mentioned earlier, Deadpool & Wolverine fails even to be consistent in its nihilism. Reynolds and Levy try far too often to get us emotionally invested in its one-note characters, and each time they do, I found myself wanting to scratch my eyes out.
Part of my frustration is the result of my being a superhero-loving loser who holds Logan in particularly high regard—I bristle at the notion of a blockbuster that would ressurect Wolverine just to make a few bucks.
But my hatred for Deadpool & Wolverine stems mostly from the simple fact that it is really f*cking bad. This is a movie whose explicit goal is to turn a billion-dollar profit by mercilessly mocking the superhero industrial-complex, and who can’t even be consistent in something as degraded as that. The film is constantly undermined by its halfhearted attempts at sincerity, with no scene better encapsulating that than when Dafne Keen shows up to reprise her role as Laura, Wolverine’s biological daughter from Logan. Her appearance is meant to invoke the greatness of that film: a pleading cry for heartfelt authenticity in a movie whose stated purpose is inauthenticity. It’s an indication that Deadpool & Wolverine’s true intentions aren’t to have fun, but exploit your nostalgia for money.
It’s disgusting. We watch as Laura waxes poetic on Wolverine’s heroism; in the background, Rob Simonsen’s cloying score swells to cloying emotional effect. As it plays out, it’s hard not to think of the film’s opening scene: Deadpool unearthing Wolverine’s grave, using his bones as cannon fodder for juvenile humor, and dancing to the tune of an NSYNC song procured from the cultural trash heap this movie strives to live up to.
If you’re going to piss on a grave, don’t pretend your penis produces holy water.
Let’s be clear: a two hour-long version of Deadpool & Wolverine filled with nothing but crude humor and celebrity cameos would be exhausting, but it would be tolerably exhausting, if only because the cameos are good and Ryan “Most Annoying Actor Alive” Reynolds is forgivable when his face is hidden behind red Lycra. If the film were comprised only of this, then I wouldn’t be here detailing its many sins. Yet here we are with a version of Deadpool & Wolverine that is also craven and pandering, a film that pleads desperately that you fall for its limp nostalgia.
To return to my earlier question: If a movie gets you to laugh, shouldn’t that be enough? The answer to that question, I think, is “Yes”—but only if you commit to the bit. Deadpool & Wolverine—a strange blend of effective genre parody and ham-fisted cries for nostalgia—does not commit to the bit. It is controlled by its desire to extract money from fanboys, thus diluting its humor into nothingness and leaving a terrible film in its wake.
For the better part of 3,000 words now, I’ve been picking apart the successes and failures of Deadpool & Wolverine as a movie. But maybe that’s the wrong approach. Maybe Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a movie at all.
Movies, after all, are supposed to have plots, characters, and a desire to convey emotion—none of which are essential elements in Deadpool & Wolverine.
Let’s break that down. D&W’s plot—inasmuch as it has one—is inconsistent and unmanageable, existing solely to wedge actors from old Fox superhero movies into the same green-screen vomit-zone. I say “actors” here, because you can hardly label Elektra, Blade, or Gambit as “characters.” Characters have motivations and personality traits, neither of which you could attribute to Deadpool & Wolverine’s cameo parade.
I’ll admit to there being at least four real characters on display in Deadpool & Wolverine: Deadpool, Wolverine, Mr. Paradox, and Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin, here playing a villain so forgettable that she wasn’t worth mentioning until this sentence), each have desires and identities of their own, and arcs that tie in with the overarching narrative. But their construction is shallow and incurious—there is the sense that the filmmakers don’t care about them at all.
As for a desire to convey emotion, Deadpool & Wolverine does at least want you to laugh, and is quite successful in doing so. But laughter always plays second fiddle to corporate synergy. The filmmakers and producers would rather claw you to the film with empty nostalgia than a compelling story.
If Deadpool & Wolverine qualifies as a movie, it’s only by the barest of margins. And while I’d like to believe that if Levy and Reynolds had they been granted total creative control, they might have created the superhero equivalent of Airplane!: a laugh-a-minute send-up of genre clichés that never takes itself seriously even once. But that’s not the film we have, and it’s hardly worth discussing it as such.
I hate to give legitimacy to Martin Scorsese’s argument that Marvel movies aren’t cinema, but I also can’t help but find Deadpool & Wolverine to be some of the best evidence of a non-movie “movie” we’ve ever seen. “Cinema was about revelation,” writes Scorsese. “It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t that. It isn’t about people or ideas; it is a corporate product made to suit audience demands. It isn’t the result of an artist or an entertainer creating something out of the recesses of their own mind; it is a series of dopamine hits strung together by the suggestion of a narrative—a nostalgia machine designed to steal billions from a quality-starved audience. In that regard, Deadpool & Wolverine has done exceptionally well, having taken $1.3 billion globally alongside a series of other box-office records.
That doesn’t make it a good movie, but that would also be missing the point. Deadpool & Wolverine can hardly be considered a movie at all.