Spoilers!
Deadpool and Wolverine made 1.25 billion dollars globally at the box office, was the second most lucrative film of this past summer, flew to the highest grossing spot of all R rated films, and made a pretty damn big splash all over the internet. It’s easy to say that a lot of people really enjoyed this movie … but it’s also easy to hear some of those people echoing the idea that this film is a rebirth of the MCU. Some people describe it as the beginning of a new chapter for Marvel, a new life, a new direction, and a new sense of quality away from the dumpster fire films of the past few years. I strongly disagree.
This little bit of writing is intended to be a review of Deadpool and Wolverine, but I honestly can’t discuss that movie without also talking about this idea of rebirth. So … was it a good movie?… Kinda?
Deadpool and Wolverine is a film that both parodies the MCU and shares its most defining weaknesses with it being a very typical Marvel flick. It whips out joke after joke about the MCU, the X-Men movies and all their tired tropes, but actively pursues and takes those tropes seriously within its own plot. In that way, the film is mucked up with an awkward middle-ground between a complete satire and a genuine story – which doesn’t work at all.
I was really enjoying the first third of the movie; however, It starts with Deadpool digging up the corpse of the Wolverine that died in the film Logan, unraveling and vandalizing the ending of that masterpiece – which is hilarious! That scene, plus the opening credit fight scene with the song Bye Bye Bye by NSYNC playing, create a really energetic and fun introduction to the movie – and exactly what I expected throughout the whole runtime. With that said, the rest of the set-up, catalyst and most of the first act were genuinely funny, vibrant and meta in the best way. Everything up to Chris Evan’s reveal as Human Torch was a wonderful, spitball-crazy time; but Deadpool and Wolverine get dropped in a boring wasteland for most of the film.
The second act is entirely made up of Deadpool and Wolverine bickering, fighting, joking and wandering around a dull CGI desert. It completely loses its sense of energy throughout the course of this time, instead honing in on a handful of actor reprises from past X-Men movies, a genuinely stupid backstory for this version of Wolverine, and a slow plot to get the main characters out of the wasteland. Although there is an imminent threat out there, it takes the duo so long to escape back towards it that I don’t care anymore by the time they reach the third act.
The third act is very ordinary Marvel climax stuff, not dissimilar from movies like Ant Man and the Wasp or Thor: Love and Thunder. The finale is dull (despite a shirtless Hugh Jackman moment) and relies on generic lifeless concepts and characters (like the main villain) to push it along. While the destruction of the Fox universe is a fun idea, and a good one for this meta film, it’s dumped with ideas like ‘the anchor beings’ that make no sense and feel completely forced just so the screenwriters would have an easier time with exposition. In all realness it doesn’t feel like Deadpool should have saved the Fox universe – they aren’t making any more movies, so what’s the point of proposing this idea only to negate it in sake of a happy ending? It would have felt more conclusive if the Fox universe effectively died in this film, but instead it attempts to live on despite the assumption of it ever seeing the light of day again.
Overall this was a film with fun moments, decent jokes, but little substance in the way that I and many other people were expecting. I call this movie formulaic and similar to most other Marvel flicks because it follows the same structure that MCU has relied on since its inception. That structure of good guys, bad guys, CGI fights and simple conflicts is not necessarily a bad thing. A film like Guardians of the Galaxy ran the exact same way as the standard superhero movie, but what made that film special – as well as many of the older MCU films – was the authenticity of the characters and the way they fit into that Marvel structure. What happened with Deadpool is that they tried to insert a fourth-wall-breaking, R-rated personality into the structure of a more genuine story. The film is formulaic when it really shouldn’t be. Deadpool and Wolverine should have been more off-the-walls crazy and a complete satire – that’s what Marvel needed.
Now for the ‘rebirth’ aspect. Although this film made a hell of a lot of money and entertained the masses just like those old MCU movies did, it does not by any means correct or reverse the mistakes made in the last few years by Marvel.
Many of those mistakes are derived from the lack of quality in the films/TV themselves, and in the lack of interconnectedness that the Infinity Saga was so acutely known for. None of the recent movies or shows have ANYTHING to do with each other, other than the fact that they vaguely take place on the same planet or in the same universe. Neither Deadpool and Wolverine nor the Dr. Doom / RDJ announcement overrides the disconnect and disinterest in the Marvel franchise at large. In my opinion, there is no way to turn back. They have given up and broken down the storylines people wanted to see after Endgame. Not even Deadpool, nor Wolverine, will be able to fix that problem.
Atticus Jackson is a sophomore writing for film, tv, and emerging media major with an ever-growing Funko Pop! collection, You can reach Atticus at [email protected]