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.

Relationship Spotlight: David Haller & Syd Barrett (Legion)

Narratively, I think David and Syd’s relationship is a really terrific thing for Legion.  David is very obviously the focal point of the show, and Syd could’ve easily been swallowed up into a flat identity as his girlfriend, especially her initial framing in the pilot.  However, it quickly becomes evident that the show is in large part Syd’s story of navigating David.  These two are far closer to equal standing than many TV couples, and given where they started, I’m quite impressed by that (premise spoilers.)

As I said, Syd’s introduction on the show leaves a lot to be desired.  She’s the beautiful girl David sees across a crowded mental health facility, and he’s taken with her far before he ever meets her.  Hearing her talk for the first time in group therapy (and realizing “she’s not like the others”) seals the deal in David’s mind – it seems a foregone conclusion that she’ll be a narrative device more than a person, someone whose love David will believe can “fix” him.  The show takes a slightly different direction with when Syd is revealed to be a fellow mutant who rescues David from Division 3 and is positioned to help him explore his own powers, but the basic set-up still appears to be that she’s made to be a function within his story.

Not so.  Once the work begins at Summerland to find the truth of David’s past inside his fractured memories, it’s immediately evident that David’s mind is thornier than any of the folks there bargained for.  They realize that, in order, to better into David’s psychological trauma, David himself needs to be absent from at least part of it, and so they sedate him to make his subconscious more cooperative.  From there, it seems there are continual roadblocks thrown up between David and his own journey of self-discovery, and as they do, Syd takes on more and more of the heavy lifting.  Granted, she’s working toward goals that are pretty much all about David, but she’s the one in the group with the greatest overlap in the Venn diagram of “emotionally invested” and “actively involved.”  She does the leg work and the investigating, she spends a lot of time in David’s increasingly disoriented head, she sifts through the noise in search of clues and develops theories, and she confronts the darkness residing inside David.  And of course, David would prefer not to be shunted off into the astral plane, mental coffins, etc., etc., but if he can’t be present himself, he takes comfort in knowing that Syd is on the case.

Naturally, it’s not all rosy, and that’s before we even get into the nitty-gritty of what’s going on in David’s head.  No, they also need to address David’s reluctance to let the doors be opened on the really dark places and his fear of what Syd will think of him when she sees those parts of himself.  He needs to learn to trust her love for him, just as she needs to prepare herself for the horrors waiting in his psyche.  For the most part, though, they’re great.  I like how they talk things through and get really emotionally vulnerable with each other, and I like how David puts his faith in Syd to understand something when he needs her to.  I like how, through one another’s eyes, they’re able realize that they may be damaged, but they’re not as far gone as they think they are.  Also, it’s a little thing, but I love that they “hold hands” in the hospital by hanging onto either end of a long stocking (Syd’s powers make her vigilant against touching anyone’s bare skin) – it’s a total Pushing Daisies moment, and it’s a tiny snippet of too-cuteness in a dizzying, cerebral nightmare of show.

Legion (2017-Present)

I’m really glad I decided to check out this show.  Objectively, I can recognize that it’s not perfect, but I love it so much that I really don’t mind.  It’s offbeat, engrossing, and visually arresting, full of terrific acting and neat themes.  In a media landscape with many, many flavors of superhero/comic book shows, this might be the most original and ambitious that I’ve seen (premise spoilers.)

For most of David’s life, it’s been his understanding that he’s sick, and he’s been in and out of mental health facilities for a number of years.  Things seem to start looking up for him when he meets Syd, an engaging fellow patient, and they enter into a relationship (working around Syd’s intense aversion to being touched.)  However, a freak incident at the hospital turns David’s entire life inside out, and before he knows it, he’s kidnapped by a shadowy government organization and then broken out by a clandestine group of mutants with the most mindbending claim of all:  that David’s apparent mental illness is actually a collection of unrecognized superpowers.  He dives headlong into the idea of being immensely powerful rather than sick, but as he and his new friends delve into his past to sort out the truth of his powers from the trauma of his experiences, they realize that things in David’s psyche might not be as clear-cut as originally anticipated.

The X-Men universe and mutants have always provided fertile ground for exploring issues of social oppression and discrimination in a superhero format, and Legion does some tremendous work in looking at how thoroughly not knowing you have powers could potentially mess someone up.  When your telepathy is called “hearing voices,” when your insistence that you’ve seen objects move by themselves are called hallucinations, and when the destruction caused by those objects actually moving (never when anyone else can see, of course) is called a violent outburst.  Even if matters weren’t more complicated than both David’s doctors and mutant friends might think, that right there is more than enough to do a lasting number on his sense of who he is, and I love watching David and his friends grapple with it.

Like Into the Badlands, the other recent show I’ve picked up, Legion is a visual feast, but in a completely different way.  While the former reminds me somewhat of Kings, the topnotch production design and attention to visual detail here makes me think more of Hannibal – fitting, since both shows deal heavily with mental states and depict that in a primarily visually-inventive way.  What Legion lacks in Hannibal’s sumptuously-grotesque beauty, it makes up for in psychedelic trippiness (the fairly-rudderless timeframe setting helps in that regard.)  I really like how it portrays the freaky goings-on in David’s head.  It’s not afraid to get super weird, flitting between different genre conventions and pulling out numerous subtle cues and tricks as the narrative slips off its linear tracks in disorienting ways.

At the center of the show is Dan Stevens as David.  I think he does a great job with the character, leaning into David’s fragility and confused psyche while still maintaining his dignity and personhood – this is a character who can veer wildly between extremes, but Stevens’s performance helps it all feel cohesive.  Also, his American accent sounds great.  The series also features great work from Jean Smart, Bill Irwin (who became something of a surprise favorite for me,) and an excellently-offbeat Jemaine Clement.  I’m less familiar with Rachel Keller, Amber Midthunder, and Jeremie Harris, but all of them do fine work as well, and Hamish Linklater turns in a cool performance in a more minor role.  When it comes to the acting, though, all praise to Aubrey Plaza.  In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say anything about her character, but over the course of season 1, she’s an absolute force of nature – so, so great.  Even if the show were lacking on the whole (which it isn’t,) I’d be grateful to it just because her performance exists.

Warnings

Disturbing images, strong thematic elements, violence, sexual content, language, and drinking/smoking/drug use.

Logan (2017, R)

I haven’t seen either of the other Wolverine films, but from the chatter I hear online, Logan is the one that finally did the character justice.  While the intensity of the violence and frequency of the swearing feels a little weird to me, just because I’m used to seeing Wolverine and Charles in the PG-13 films of the larger franchise, this movie is as well-made as it is brutal.  I don’t quite know what it means for the future of the franchise outside the newer X-Men films set in the past, but if we don’t see him again, this is an excellent swan song for the character (premise spoilers.)

Set a number of years after the events of the most chronologically-recent X-Men movie, the age of mutants would seem to be over.  Many have been rounded up and killed by shadowy government types, no new mutants have manifested in the last 20+ years, and the few remaining old guard are living in hiding.  Logan, whose mortality, it seems, is finally starting to catch up to him, is dealing with decreased healing, gradual aging, and the long-delayed ill effects of the adamantium in his body.  He’d like nothing more than to keep his head down and look after Charles, whose incredible mental powers have been made unstable by a degenerative brain disease, but he’s dragged rather unwillingly back into the game when a woman comes to him begging for an escort/bodyguard to sanctuary in Canada.  She has a little girl in tow, a young, lab-grown mutant who shares Logan’s regenerative powers and adamantium-fused skeleton.  With the scientists who created (and subsequently wanted to destroy) her on their tail, Logan, Charles, and the child, Laura, set off on a desperate race north so Laura can take refuge.

As I said, the violence here is insane.  We’re talking limbs being sliced off and claws sinking deep into people’s skulls.  This is arterial-blood-spraying, bone-crunching, agonizing violence, more in line with what you’d see in Deadpool or Kick-Ass than X-Men.  Now, the fights are super cool, especially when Laura is involved.  Newcomer Dafne Keen plays Laura as part traumatized child and part feral animal, a frightened but deadly creature backed into a corner who refuses to let herself be taken.  I love the vicious savagery of her fighting, punctuated by primal screams and an intensely-coiled survival instinct that takes her over.  But again, it is a little jarring to see from Wolverine – not that he isn’t capable of this sort of thing, certainly not, but I’m so used to the PG-13 version of him that it took my brain a while to settle into the fact that he’s the guy leaving this trail of maimed corpses in his wake.  Weirdly enough, though, the R-level swearing is even harder to get used to – hearing Charles drop F-bombs made my ears rings the first few times.

The story to go along with the high-octane action is grim but well-crafted.  I was reminded of neo-Westerns like No Country for Old Men.  There’s just this sense of a dying era, of aging men fighting against a callous world that’s long since finished with them and their ilk.  Even as Laura represents a possible future for mutants, it’s a twisted one that’s already been stained by so much horror and bloodshed, making you question if it could ever be like it once was, imperfect as it was then.  Deeply nihilistic with tiny scraps of hope fluttering around the edges, it’s a pretty unsettling film that stays with you long after watching.

Warnings

Lots of graphic violence, swearing, drug references and brief nudity.

Quicksilver Character Comparison: Peter Maximov & Pietro Maximoff (X-Men and The Avengers)

Back when Days of Future Past came out and I flailed nerdishly over X-Men’s Quicksilver, I talked about the franchise overlap with the character being fair game for both X-Men and The Avengers.  This was before Age of Ultron, so I had yet to see Marvel’s Quicksilver, but I was already looking forward to comparing the two version of the speedster.  (Note:  to avoid confusion, this is the last time I’ll use the name Quicksilver.  Since X-Men Americanized his name, I’ll be referring to the X-Men version as Peter and the Avengers version as Pietro.)

Both iterations of the character are awesome, but in fairly different ways.  Everything about Peter says “larger than life”:  the silver hair and goggles, which weirdly kind of work even though they shouldn’t, his ridiculously huge stash of pilfered loot in his room, the quick cuts and comic beats, Evan Peters’s snappy line delivery, and his show-stopping speed scenes in Days of Future Past and Apocalypse.  He’s fast, funny, and fun, whipping through Days of Future Past like a whirlwind, and it’s not just his powers.  Temperament-wise, he’s like a ping pong ball, always eager to leap ahead to the next thing; you get the sense that he’d go well and truly crazy if forced to wait around.

Pietro shares a number of Peter’s traits besides the speed, enough to recognize them as the same character.  Like Peter, he can be cocky (more than a bit of showoff,) a smart-aleck, and easily distracted.  Pietro is different less in character than in the tone of the portrayal itself.  While Peter is a definite “character,” Pietro feels more like a person, like (powers aside) I could easily meet someone like him in real life.  This is partly through the more low-key expression of his humor and partly through his more well-rounded depiction.  Pietro is a young guy with superpowers and can act like it, but he’s also known serious loss.  When he tells Ultron about the deaths of his parents and the days he and Wanda spent trapped in the wreckage of their home waiting to die, you can see the angry and pain driving him.  The different sides of him coexist in a way that feels consistent.  (By contrast, when Peter gets a more serious side plot in Apocalypse, it makes him feel… not like Peter.  The different sides of him are too jarring for me, and his subdued scenes just make me wonder when entertaining Peter is coming back.)

So that’s the major difference in tone.  The biggest difference in terms of character is probably where their focus lies.  Peter is pretty self-absorbed, though not in a particularly bad way.  It’s just that he’s all about instant gratification.  When Charles, Wolverine, and Hank ask him to help them with their mission, his first question is, “What’s in it for me?”  Like I said, this isn’t a condemnation of him – for a teenager a.k.a. walking id (running, in his case,) it’s perfectly believable.  By contrast, Pietro is always, always a package deal with Wanda.  He usually defers to his twin and looks out for her above all else.  Of course, much of this is down to the blindingly obvious fact that Wanda is in Age of Ultron but not the X-Men films; Peter can’t be expected to consider the needs of someone who isn’t there.  However, plot-driven or not, it still changes the character in a big way.  Pietro sees things outside of himself that Peter really doesn’t.

In the end, both versions of the character have plenty of merit.  For me, I’d say Peter is the most entertaining, while Pietro is the most engaging.  Peter probably gets the biggest showcase moments, but Pietro (IMO) makes an overall greater impact.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016, PG-13)

*Disclaimer: One more Bryan Singer X-Men movie. Even though the overall MCU and the DC TV shows have definitely upped the ante for me when it comes to superhero media, I enjoyed this franchise for a good many years, but I have a hard time watching any of Singer’s films now. At least we still have First Class and Logan.*

 
I’m still trying to decide about this movie.  I don’t think it was as good as Days of Future Past, and I think First Class was better-made, even though I think Apocalypse equals that one for entertainment value, or is at least close to it.  There’s some definite clunkiness amid a number of strong performances and a handful of stellar sequences.

In keeping with the franchise’s new tradition of jumping 10 years with every film, we’ve hit the ‘80s now (not that anyone looks any older, and no one but Mystique and Wolverine has explicitly-stated reasons for their perma-youth.  Also, at this rate, they have one film to go before Xavier and Magneto need to look like Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen again – is it just a switch that gets flipped one day?)  The Professor’s school is well-established and, after the events of Days of Future Past, mutants and humans are enjoying a time of relative peace.  However, a blast from the past – namely, an immortal, all-powerful mutant from ancient Egypt who positioned himself as a god – has just resurfaced to wreak major, world-ending havoc, and it’s up to heroes new and old to stop him.

Some of the action here is really impressive.  I love the big final battle, which finds a great balance between the various characters and their unique powers, and Quicksilver has another terrific speedster scene – I honestly can’t say which I like more, this one or the one from Days of Future Past (unfortunately, this is the only sequence in which the character really feels like the same Quicksilver.  I know it’s been 10 years, but it’s weird that he’d change that much.  It feels wrong not to have him bouncing off the walls in most of his scenes.)  I love most of the casting for the new characters.  Sophie Turner (Sansa from Game of Thrones) makes an excellent Jean Grey, and the end of the film has me excited to see where things are going with her character.  Tye Sheridan does a nice job with Cyclops and, although Kodi Smit-McPhee is no Alan Cumming, he’s very good as young Nightcrawler, and he looks great.  Alexandra Shipp has all the makings of a wonderful Storm, but I don’t think she’s used very well here – I know I definitely wanted more from the story than I got for her.  All the old guard turn in good work, especially (no surprise) James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender.

The story, for me, is just all right.  Apocalypse is a little too “non-specified all-powerful megalomaniac” for me, and while Oscar Isaac (Poe from the new Star Wars) gives it his all, the script doesn’t give him much to work with.  Most of the newcomers’ storylines feel at least a bit shortchanged, and Magneto’s arc somehow feels both repetitive and unbelievable at the same time, which really shouldn’t happen.  Also, this is maybe a little thing, and I know there are lines in the movie to explain it, but it bugs me that Mystique and Beast spend so much of the movie looking like Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult.  It feels disingenuous to the characters, like the film wants them more recognizable (especially J-Law) for monetary reasons; just didn’t work for me.

Warnings

Comic-book violence, swearing, drinking, naked Mystique, and thematic elements.