It’s no secret that Marvel needs a saviour. With (admittedly very notable) exceptions like Guardians 3 and No Way Home, their post-Endgame slate has been met with either critical savagings (hello Thor 4) or box office misery (take a bow, The Marvels), and a general sense of multiversal malaise. After the Fox acquisition brought the X-Men etc under the MCU banner, they’ve decided that their messiah needs to be Deadpool, and so here we are with Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel Studios giving us their first stab at an X-property and their first R-rated outing. It’s an attempt that looks certain to boost their finances; creatively though? This is Marvel at its most miserable dead end.
Though it makes plenty of knowing, wink-wink jokes about the whole thing, Deadpool & Wolverine is yet another multiverse tale, this time teaming up Deadpool/Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds, still steering this franchise as both star and writer) from the Fox-era X-Men universe with a new Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), in order to save Wade’s universe. From the off, it’s hard to care, especially about Logan. This is not *the* Logan – he remains dead – but just a variant from a separate timeline that we don’t even really see, and it’s not long before this classic comic-book pairing are stuck in The Void, Marvel’s generic netherworld from the Loki TV show where the stakes never feel all that high.
And that’s sort of it for the story. New director, and regular Reynolds collaborator, Shawn Levy seems disinterested in doing anything other than presenting us with a series of vignettes of Deadpool and Wolverine doing cool shit while sinister Brits scheme in the background. These are Emma Corrin, as Professor X’s long-lost sister Cassandra Nova, and Matthew Macfadyen as rogue time agent/sci-fi Tom Wambsgans variant Mr Paradox, and they’re having some fun while attempting to bring some semblance of coherence and purpose to proceedings.
Mostly though, Deadpool & Wolverine runs on pure Family Guy cutaway logic (and, often, Family Guy cutaway humour, from jokes about pervy scoutmasters to the endless pop culture references) and is edited like a hyperactive TikTok, song after song after song kicking in whenever there’s a fight or a scene transition. The result is a film that’s mostly just noise, designed more to be clipped into a series of clap-moment memes than function as a standalone thing. And yes, there are cameos galore to facilitate this, some genuinely fun, others just vehicles for a ton of subpar jokes.
I’ve never gelled much with the Deadpool franchise humour, but here in particular it is so overwritten that it quickly starts to viscerally grate. Any good line or visual gag, and I’ll admit there are a few, gets hammered into the ground, and most of the big sweary insults just go on and on, more concerned with its own R-rated-ness than actually being funny. Some of the fights fare a little better; big, bloody mass brawls and Cassandra Nova’s creepily physical telepathic powers force the film to take itself a little more seriously for a moment and it’s better for it, and there is some properly cool choreography, even if it is a little hidden by the overzealous cutting.
For the real die-hard Marvel fans for whom a reference-laden cameo really means something important, Deadpool & Wolverine is a laser-guided missile to the pleasure centre of the brain. If, though, these don’t mean much to you beyond a ‘hey, that’s neat’, this is an exhausting couple of hours. Its sheer busyness does make it undeniably diverting at times, but if you want to save an entire cinematic universe, especially when your 2025 slate looks downright precarious, ‘diverting’ ain’t quite enough for long-term health.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 