Deadpool & Wolverine battle superhero bullshit to a stalemate
Shawn Levy is ill-equipped to do much more than supervise cameos and let Ryan Reynolds joke.
Photo by Disney
The superhero Wade Wilson, better known as Deadpool and played in movies by Ryan Reynolds, has superpowers that range from fairly standard (like the ability to quickly heal and regenerate himself) to genuinely unusual (like his snarky ability to issue fourth-wall-breaking commentary on his own adventures). But his most valuable skill, at least on screen, may be his resilience in the face of superhero bullshit. The first two Deadpool movies occupied a weird little corner of the X-Men-centric universe built by 20th Century Fox, full of odds-and-ends characters like metallic mutant Colossus (Stefan Kapičić) sardonic superpowered student Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), and an entire incarnation of the superteam X-Force (until they were mostly killed off on their first mission). Deadpool has turned these characters’ relative obscurity into a source of fun through sheer force of mischievous will—a will he clearly and metatextually shares with his performer, as Reynolds kicked around in no fewer than four previous comics adaptations (including one where he actually played Wade Wilson!) before finally finding his own signature superhero. Both character and actor flipped their also-ran status from liability to unlikely selling point.
But it’s hard to remain the scrappy underdog when your movies flirt with billion-dollar worldwide grosses—or when your parent-company studio gets swallowed up by Disney. So Deadpool & Wolverine is a trilogy-capper that doubles as its own corporate merger between the premier continuity monster of the 21st century and, well, if not the entire FoX-Men universe, then at least Deadpool’s R-rated brand of irreverence. Deadpool himself could succinctly explain the motivation behind this seemingly incongruous pairing: A flailing Marvel Cinematic Universe sensing that there was still money in the Reynolds version of Deadpool.
The continuity monster demands more, though, and works overtime to fudge greater stakes: Over in his universe, Deadpool, now working a regular job after quitting the dangerous and degenerate merc game at the behest of Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), supposedly yearns to play a part in something bigger. (This is a bit of a stretch, given the fact that he spent Deadpool 2 securing his found family and saving a bunch of mutant kids from an abusive orphanage before messing with time itself in the movie’s jokey mid-credits scenes—not to mention his presumed open invitation to clean up his act and join the X-Men!) He gets his shot at big-time world-saving when he learns that the Time Variance Authority, the timeline managers previously seen in Marvel’s Loki TV series, plans to “prune” his world from existence, and endeavors to stop them. But he isn’t sure he can handle this task on his own, and seeks out Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) for help.
Only this isn’t the exact same Wolverine who appeared in nine previous X-Men movies from the Fox administration, despite the presence of Jackman. The Wolverine we know died at the end of James Mangold’s moving, borderline despairing Logan.