Review: Deadpool & Wolverine
Finally fulfilling the promise that was dashed in X-Men Origins: Wolverine 15 years ago, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) and Wolverine finally team up properly for the first R-rated MCU movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, which also serves as a grande finale for Fox’s sometimes great, sometimes awful Marvel universe.
Deadpool & Wolverine picks up with Wade Wilson (Reynolds) having hung up his superhero costume and living a boring life as a car salesman. He’s captured on his birthday by the TVA, where he meets Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), who offers Wade a spot on the “sacred timeline” of the MCU’s Earth-616 but also reveals that Wade’s universe is going to die because their “anchor being” who holds the universe together is gone, the Logan (Jackman) who died in Logan. Not willing to let his universe die, Wade steals a TVA datapad and jumps across the multiverse to find a new Wolverine to take the place of the deceased Logan, finding a bitter Wolverine who made a mistake that left the rest of the X-Men dead. Wade has to get this Wolverine back to his universe before Paradox can unleash a “Time Ripper, a TVA device he devised that will “mercy kill” and end the Fox universe immediately upon activation. The plot is fairly thin, with just enough to motivate Wade and Wolverine and keep them moving, but the movie is really about their dynamic, humor, and action. Like the other Deadpool movies, the humor is fast, furious, and raunchy, with Wade making tons of 4th wall-breaking jokes about the careers of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, what Disney will and won’t allow, and the current state of the MCU. The action is also almost uniformly excellent, with brutal, slow-motion-filled battles, including an opening sequence that sees Wade fighting the agents of the TVA with an unlikely weapon set to “Bye, Bye, Bye” by NSync. There are also two excellent fan service battles between Wade and Wolverine, one taking place inside a Honda Odyssey minivan that hilariously uses the seats, seatbelts, and everything else in the vehicle in one of the bloodiest and most comedic bits of product placement I’ve ever seen. It’s clear that Reynolds and Jackman have been waiting for over a decade for this, like all of us fans, and are massive fans of the characters themselves, so they know precisely what to deliver to bring maximum excitement to the audience, not the least of which is Jackman finally wearing a comic-accurate Wolverine costume.
One of the biggest things that makes Deadpool & Wolverine such a blast is the many cameos and easter eggs that are jam-packed throughout. Some were already revealed in marketing, like the return of Dafne Keene as Laura/X-23, but some truly mind-blowing appearances from characters and actors make you wonder how logistically they even came to be. There are many more Fox universe characters than MCU, but it makes sense when you realize this is a final goodbye to the Marvel movies that Fox produced starting in 2000 with X-Men. Outside of the cameos, Matthew Macfadyen is a delightfully smarmy villain who is intimidating until even slightly threatened, at which point he collapses, and Macfadyen clearly has tons of fun. Also seemingly having tons of fun is Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova, the twin sister of Charles Xavier, who was banished to The Void by the TVA as an infant. She rules The Void and takes perverse delight in using her mutant powers in the most disturbing ways possible. Her go-to move is putting her fingers into people’s heads to read their minds or physically manipulate them like a puppet. There’s also the army of the Deadpool Corps, which is a factor in one of the movie’s best action sequences and features many distinct and bizarre Deadpool variants. Everyone will probably have an actor or character they would have wanted to see appear. I would have liked to have seen 1 or 2 more TVA characters, like Owen Wilson, or a few more X-Men cast members from the original or First Class series. Still, there’s no way that fans of Marvel and Fox movies will leave Deadpool & Wolverine disappointed. If you’re a fan of the cast of characters introduced in the prior Deadpool movies, you may be a bit disappointed, as they all are pretty much relegated to cameos, with only Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) and Peter (Rob Delaney) getting some hilarious comedic bits. There’s an odd choice to break up Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and Wade off-screen between Deadpool 2 and this film, which is one of the driving factors of Wade trying to become an Avenger or a more important hero, but it’s not really fleshed out or explored in any meaningful way and feels a bit shoehorned in just to add a little seriousness so the movie isn’t constant gags and jokes.
Deadpool & Wolverine is an absolute blast and one of the most fun and funny movies in the history of the MCU. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are clearly reveling in this chance to team up and use every moment to its fullest, with tons of great banter and back and forth, along with some excellent fight scenes. The plot is a bit thin due to everything else crammed into the movie, but you will hardly notice or care about all the cameos, action, and jokes constantly happening. This is a Spider-Man: No Way Home-level celebration of fandom and a must-watch for Deadpool, X-Men , and Marvel fans.
