Remember a few years back, when at the climax of the godawful Free Guy, Ryan Reynolds got a hold of a big box of Disney(c) merchandise and used it to beat the bad guys? Hulk Hands, Cap's shield, and -the movie paused for effect - OMG, a freakin' lightsaber! Squeal, nerds, squeal!
This cynical act of corporate fellatio did not go unnoticed. Only instead of leaving some money on the bedstand, the Disney powers that be instead awarded its director - consummate hack Shawn Levy* - the keys to the closest thing the Marvel Cinematic Universe's got left that's close to a sure thing: a crossover project between the Deadpool and The Wolverine franchises.
It gets off to an extremely poor start. First we have to endure Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) commenting on just how awesome the Marvel intro music is, which unfortunately sets the tone for much of the movie, and then an introductory fight/credits sequence in which our protagonist digs up the Wolverine's skeleton from the grave he ended up in Logan, and ends up using the corpse's adamantium bones to kill dozens of faceless henchmen. It's a fun idea on paper, but it's spoiled with a joyless, very computer-assisted execution and extremely tacky, unfunny, endless cutaways to Deadpool dancing - foreshadowing his inevitable appearance as a skin in Fortnite.
And then of course the film pulls a 'how did I get here' move (the script is nothing if not forthright about its own shoddiness) to pull back a little. Deadpool, it turns out, has been in the dumps after failing an audition to join the avengers (whose off-screen presence is lionized by the cinematography and soundtrack). He's left his superhero/merc days behind and is working as a used car salesman, his long suffering wife abandoned him (they didn't fridge her, at least, but this movie still finds a way to do without poor Morena Baccarin), and... well, basically, he's in your basic slump hacky scripts use to provide a bog-standard "rise to the occasion" heroic arc.
The occasion here is that the TVA, an organization from one of those Disney plus shows I refuse to watch on principle**, tries to get him to mercy-kill his own timeline which is slowly dying off because Logan died when... he wasn't supposed to, I guess? (Don't even start poking holes on that because it's basically all holes.) They try to bribe him with the opportunity to join the avengers on a non-doomed timeline, but oh shock, surprise, Deadpool does indeed rise to the ocassion/hero's call, tells them to get bent, and goes across the multiverse to find a replacement Wolverine (various actors, but mostly Hugh Jackman).
He does end up finding one that doesn't kill him outright, the worst Wolverine, apparently, one that committed a crime so heinous he's infamous across the universe (get ready to be disappointed when you finally learn why). Then our mismatched buddies are kicked out of reality by the TVA and dumped into a wasteland ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin). There they meet some other castoffs from Marvel history and hatch a plan to get back to reality to stop Deadpool's timeline from being erased... and I should probably stop here before I spoil any of the bright spots in this otherwise fairly mediocre movie.
Do you love Ryan Reynolds? Are you heavily invested in the Marvel comics and movies? If you do/are, chances are you'll like this. It's basically Ryan Reynolds doing his motormouth, sometimes low-key funny, sometimes annoying schtick, for about two hours, peppered with a ton -and I really mean a ton- of reverential fan-service, with a tiny side of (very gentle) making fun of Marvel and Disney. And while there's some obvious affection for the material and some odd turns in the script, it's patently, overtly cynical. A film created by market forces rather than any sort of authorial voice. Saying that it's 'Spiderman: No Way Home' but without a heart or a decent story might be taking things too far, but.. it kind of fits. The previous two Deadpool movies managed to carve out their own identity, but this feels first and foremost a mid-tier MCU movie - albeit one with a 15/R rating.
Five people are credited with writing this. Five! That's about how many times I laughed out loud! That's not as bad as it sounds, as I was reasonably low-key-amused by Reynold's affable antics (I don't mind him, though his routine is pretty shopworn by now). And I appreciated a few other jokes even if I didn't find them particularly funny. Some casting choices and the meta-level humour are kind of inspired, if overtly geeky. Still, it was about half an hour until the film actually managed to make me chuckle. That first act is really dire.
But no one expects that - for all its posturing, this is still mainstream entertainment, same as it's ever been; And that's fine. The first movie, after all, made a huge show about not being your grandaddy's superhero origin story, while still being very much your grandaddy's superhero origin story. But with graphic violence and swearwords.
What's depressing is how predictable everything in Deadpool & Wolverine is, a mish-mash of superhero media from the last decade, complete with life lessons and rote character growth. In a facepalm moment, it even tries to make a joke out of how we're all sick and tired of multiverse stories. Lampshading, the practice of making fun of how shit what you're doing as you do it, deserves a slow and ignominious death.
Director Shawn Levy fails to bring anything to the table yet again, other than a basic competence at juggling the needs of a modern blockbuster and making his movie look pretty expensive. Not good, not cohesive, just expensive. If you want proof of this, look at his attempt to capture some of the Mad Max magic; The guy's got two of the most visually distinct films ever to crib from, and his version is still the visual equivalent of a bad SNL parody. Even worse, that whole element is completely, utterly unnecessary, as there are no action sequences or jokes that actually make use of all that (mediocre!) production design.
The action is messy and uninteresting, with every fight shot in a completely different style; It's as if none of the secondary units were talking to each other or the director. I have to admit the very last one is pretty decent, though. I did like that one. Good job everyone involved.
As for the acting... it's fine. You know exactly what to expect, and most of the actors are at least engaged and committed to their roles. Jackman, especially, whom we're dangerously close to taking for granted. It was unexpectedly nice to see some of the others again, even in these circumstances.
So I didn't laugh much, and I didn't get excited at any point (except when a character I do give a damn about appeared to play second fiddle for a while)... but I also didn't get bored, mostly because the film does try and get weird quite a bit, and that's kind of interesting to see plastered on the big screen with such a huge budget. More interesting still is how muddled the film becomes as it goes along.
For all its jingoism on how awesome the MCU is (aside from its current slump, which is duly noted), in the end the script is more about paying homage to the Sony and Fox incarnations of past Marvel movies, which... even if it's a little cynical, well, it's still rather sweet. The screenplay botches this and doesn't really know what to do with the new/old characters (they're literally just disposable accessories in the protagonists' quest) but the way things are set up hints at an interpretation where a rich cast of diverse characters are arrayed against a large, faceless organization where corporate synergies trump experimentation and individual voices.
That's pretty clear, right? You can almost see the bones of something much more interesting somewhere behind the surface, intuit rough edges and actual commentary from maybe a few drafts ago, sanded down since so as to not cause any offense among the corporate overlords.
But we're in a boring timeline - we only get a bland, mildly amusing shadow of that.
Deadpool & Wolverine is not terrible, but it's pretty far from being good. It's already, depressingly, a huge success, which means that we're stuck with Shawn Levy for ages henceforth, and probably with the worst synergistic tendencies of modern superhero films too. But hey, at least there's a heartfelt homage during the credits, and the post-credits sequence is very, very funny.
*: Levy, one assumes, has gotten really good at deep-throating big corporations by now; He's probably still got the taste of Google's dick in his mouth after (the also fucking dreadful) The Internship.
**: It's yet another cynical, shitty move, but honestly it's not nearly as bad as Scarlet Witch Featuring Doctor Strange; The organization's function is explained quickly, apparently it's basically a really shitty, poorly thought out version of Isaac Aasimov's Eternity but with multiple timelines. That's good enough for me.
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