Deadpool & Wolverine (2024, R)

*Premise spoilers—I know everything is all over the internet by now, but I’ll still avoid the major stuff in this post.*

In the run-up to this movie, I was looking forward to it but annoyed by the whole “Can Deadpool & Wolverine save the MCU?” narrative. I think that ignores excellent work that Marvel has put out in recent years, and it frames it as the MCU needing to have Straight White Guys out front in order to succeed (not that Deadpool is straight, but an irritating number of people insist on framing him that way.) But putting that baggage aside, I liked it a lot. I thought it was entertaining, the multiverse cameos were mostly well done, and it’s strongly anchored by the chemistry between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.

What’s It About?

Wade Wilson has hung up the guns and the katanas, and he’s trying to be content as a regular guy. But a visit from the TVA pulls him back into the superhero game. When he discovers that his universe is dying due to the loss of its “Anchor Being,” Deadpool sets out to get a replacement Variant from another universe. He snags himself a new Wolverine, but the TVA makes it clear that Variants can’t simply be swapped out for one another. He and Logan wind up stuck in the Void, with Deadpool desperate to get back and save his universe while Logan just wants to be left alone.

Who’s In It?

Any Marvel film deeply involving the multiverse is of course going to pull in some cameos. I won’t get into the specifics today, but on the whole, I thought the film struck a good balance with them. While I wouldn’t put it up there with No Way Home, the appearances here range from fun to surprising to meaningful. They pull in some I wasn’t expecting, and while I’d have liked to see a little more from the biggest characters who popped up, the movie does a decent job spreading the love.

I find Matthew Macfadyen rather fascinating as TVA Agent Paradox—his performance keeps me guessing. And I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the later seasons of The Crown or anything else that Emma Corrin has been in, so I didn’t realize they were the one playing Cassandra. However, they’re effective as the creepy, megalomaniacal mutant. Naturally, we also get some (very brief) appearances from Deadpool mainstays like Morena Baccarin, Karan Soni (Pavitr!), and Leslie Uggums.

But unsurprisingly, the headline is the interactions between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as Deadpool and Wolverine. I know Reynolds offers up a very particular shtick, especially as Deadpool, but it largely works for me, and I thought he was a lot of fun here. And Jackman is as good as he’s ever been as Logan. The way Reynolds and Jackman play off each other is excellent from start to finish.

What Do I Love About It?

·        The opening action sequence. There are a number of good fight scenes in the film, but this one is just deliciously Deadpool! I love the outrageousness of it, how it’s paced to the soundtrack, and of course, how Deadpool takes periodic breaks from the carnage to dance it out.

·        Of the more fanservice-y parts of the film, my favorite was probably the montage where Deadpool searches for a new Wolverine. Fast and funny, with one of the film’s best fourth-wall breaks for me.

·        The relationship between Deadpool and Logan. Plenty has been said already about these two, and I’m in agreement with those who think it’s the film’s strongest asset. I really dig the love/hate thing they have going on, with the gruff/tortured Logan grumbling about being saddled with the perpetually unserious Deadpool. And both characters are able to bring out surprising things in one another, leading to a nice payoff in the third act. Whether you ship it or not, these two are great together.

·        It’s a little thing, but I love the moment where Logan asks Deadpool if he’s been tested for ADHD. Delightful!

Warnings

Copious amounts of the old ultraviolence, tons of language, sexual references, drinking/smoking/drug references, gross-out humor, disturbing images, and thematic elements.

Deadpool 2 (2018, R)

I’m out of town this weekend and haven’t had a chance to get to Thursday’s Daily Show, so I’ll get to News Satire Roundup another day.  In the meantime...

I got a kick out of the first Deadpool movie and enjoyed this one a lot too, although I’d give the first film the edge.  This one, as a sequel, is predictably bigger, wilder, and more outrageous, and the story has some pretty neat stuff in it, but there are a few directions the movie takes that I think are missteps.

Deadpool has been brought to his lowest point when he meets Russell, a young mutant with a lot of anger built up by years of injustice.  When Cable, a badass cyborg from the future, appears on a mission to kill Russell (in a classic “go back in time to kill the bad guy as a kid” scenario,) Deadpool finds himself standing in the way of the one-man mission, convinced that Russell isn’t yet a lost cause and determined to save him.

I like the general thrust of the story.  It maybe seems unbelievable that Deadpool would go to bat so thoroughly for somebody other than himself, but the film makes it work, and I like the idea of trying to avert disaster by saving someone rather than killing them (shades of Cole with Jennifer on 12 Monkeys, though I like it even better there.)  As can be expected, the jokes fly in at high speed, with all the fourth-wall-breaking meta-ness you could want.

Plotwise, my main complaint is that some of the characters aren’t used as much or as well as I would’ve liked.  I’m really disappointed in how Vanessa, who I really enjoyed in the first movie, is used here, and I wish we could’ve gotten more with the X-Force stuff, as well as Negasonic Teenage Warhead and her girlfriend.  I love that we finally have unambiguously-queer superheroes on the big screen (even though Deadpool himself is canonically pansexual, there’s nothing in either film that couldn’t conceivably be dismissed as a joke,) but I’d have liked it a lot better if they weren’t glorified extras.

Speaking of X-Force, Domino is awesome.  Atlanta’s Zazie Beetz is terrific in the role, she’s cool and stylish, and I love the contrast she offers with Deadpool.  First, there’s the different angle she brings to the action scenes – while Deadpool offers up his usual audacious ultraviolence, which is very cool, Domino’s mutant powers (which she describes simply as being innately lucky) allow for big, crazy action set pieces that are just wild to see, the meticulous falling-into-place-ness of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film mixed with the outlandish violence of a Kingsman movie.  Additionally, her luck gives her this buoyant attitude that’s sunshiny and chill at the same time, which plays nicely off of Deadpool’s cheeky nihilism.

In addition to the main cast from the original film, including the impeccably-cast Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, and the aforementioned Beetz as Domino, the movie stacks up a nice cast (even though, like I said, we don’t see as much of some of them as I wish we did.)  As Cable, Josh Brolin plays a second Marvel villain, albeit outside the MCU, and X-Force includes the likes of Bill Skarsgård, Terry Crews, and Lewis Tan (Zhou Cheng from Iron Fist.)  I’m not familiar with Julian Dennison, who plays Russell, but he does a great job.

Warnings

Copious amounts of violence, tons of swearing, sexual content/references, smoking/drinking/drug use, and strong thematic elements (including suicide and child abuse.)

Deadpool (2016, R)

I’m not very familiar with Deadpool (my first exposure was actually the test footage for this movie,) but I was aware of the excitement surrounding the character and the idea of a movie for him, as well as what was evidently the near-criminal waste of him/Ryan Reynolds in the Wolverine:  Origins movie.  I also knew going in to expect a funny, high-octane show-the-blood-style comic-book movie a la Mark Millar.  Safe to say the film delivers on that every level.

Wade Wilson, a foul-mouthed mercenary with a don’t-make-a-thing-of-it preference for helping the little guy, has his life thrown off-kilter by a terminal cancer diagnosis.  When a shady guy in a suit promises to both cure his cancer and make him a superhero, Wade is skeptical but decides to try to keep his girlfriend Vanessa from having to watch him waste away.  He sneaks off in the middle of the night to the super-secret experimental lab, but the results aren’t what he bargained for.  He’s left functionally immortal, with an automatically-regenerating body, but the mutation has also made him grotesque, and he doesn’t think he can go home to Vanessa until he finds the scientist/sadist who did this to him and forces him to fix it.

Ryan Reynolds is absolutely perfect to play a vulgar, smartass, superpowered former mercenary on a revenge kick.  He’s funny and profane without (for me) veering too far into d-bag territory, and even with a mask completely covering his face for most of the movie, his screen presence is still charismatic (granted, I don’t know how often Deadpool is CGI’d, but that would still mean Reynolds is making the character come through on voiceover alone, so kudos to him either way.)  In order for wildly graphic, completely unapologetic violence to work for me, it really depends on the character, and Deadpool’s casually-cheerful brand of slaughter just seems to fit.

The plot is fairly formulaic, though it mixes things up by extenstive use of a nonlinear structure.  But what it lacks in storytelling creativity, it makes up in snarky one-liners.  There’s mid-fight banter, cheeky sex jokes, pop culture references, and colorful analogies, not to mention huge amounts of fourth-wall breaking (sometimes explicit, with Deadpool directly addressing the camera, other times just throwaway lines – my favorites include a reference to sewing Deadpool’s mouth shut and a Stewart-or-McAvoy Professor X distinction.)  One place, though, where the movie falls down for me is with Deadpool’s much-vaunted pansexuality.  It’s arguably represented, but there aren’t any non-heteronormative references that couldn’t be explained away as jokes if desired.  Since Deadpool does spend most of the film preoccupied with his monogamous girlfriend, it’s understandable that we mostly get that side of things, but a single line mentioning an ex-boyfriend or zhefriend wouldn’t have broken the bank.

Other than Reynolds, the only actor I’m familiar with is Morena Baccarin (Inara from Firefly) as Vanessa.  She does what she can with a pretty thin girlfriend characterization.  I also enjoy Brianna Hildebrande as an X-Men trainee, the (as Deadpool notes) awesomely-named Negasonic Teenage Warhead.  I mean, how do you get cooler than that?  I wish we’d gotten to see more of her in action, but little we do get of her powers is pretty hardcore.

Warnings

Strong violence, language, sexual content, drinking/smoking, and drug references.