By Jake Wilson
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE ★★
(MA) 128 minutes
Truthfully, it’s not clear to me why anyone would want more of Deadpool. It’s not like we haven’t had a steady supply of Ryan Reynolds’ motor-mouthed schtick over the past decade. And there’s something very mid-2010s about the whole masked-superhero-as-edgelord concept, all those coy one-liners about butts and touching yourself and the thrill of killing, as if the target audience consisted of pubescent boys who might grow up to be gun nuts or just bi-curious.
Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool/Wade Wilson and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine/Logan in the slapsticky Deadpool & Wolverine.
As for the character’s habit of breaking the fourth wall, this is little different in principle from Bugs Bunny’s asides to the camera, except one suspects these days the gags have to go through a lot more lawyers.
Certainly, what’s not on the agenda in director Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is any form of subversion, even if our hero does begin his first big-screen adventure in six years by snickering “Marvel’s so stupid”.
The explicit context here is the Disney Corporation’s 2019 acquisition of 21st Century Fox, meaning that what was originally a stand-alone movie franchise based on the Marvel Comics character can now be folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the assumption is that true fans will care deeply about all this, as sports fans care about their favourite players being traded).
Ryan Reynolds delivers his same old routine as Wade Wilson in Deadpool & Wolverine. Credit: AP
The same deal means Hugh Jackman’s clawed mutant Wolverine, formerly a member of the X-Men, now qualifies as a Disney character as well – or would have, if he hadn’t made the ultimate act of self-sacrifice at the end of Logan, his 2017 last hurrah.
Once the challenge of bringing him back from the dead has been sorted, Levy and his team can move ahead with the real business of the movie, which proves to be one more caper comedy pairing Reynolds’ chirping joke machine with a no-nonsense macho foil, the way he was paired with Samuel L. Jackson in The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Dwayne Johnson in Red Notice and no doubt other gruff daddy figures in other films I can’t remember.
Much of the indifferently directed action takes place in the Void, a metafictional realm very palely resembling the desert of the Mad Max films, where discarded Marvel characters are subject to the iron whim of youthfully androgynous psycho queen Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).
The gender politics are convoluted enough to defy analysis in a short space, even before we get to Matthew Macfadyen as the scurrying supernatural bureaucrat Mr Paradox, perhaps the first Marvel villain who would fit smoothly into the universe of Are You Being Served?
Still, this might be the queerest Marvel film ever, in its necessarily facetious way. Deadpool still pines for his old girlfriend (Morena Baccarin) but proclaims his pansexuality every chance he gets – and while the heroes don’t literally wind up in bed together, their powers of instantaneous healing allow them to spend a lot of time plunging weapons into each other’s flesh: an especially energetic bout of combat is backed by You’re the One that I Want from Grease, in case there were any doubt the filmmakers are in on the joke.
Nor is there doubt, on the other hand, that the film remains a Disney product at heart. All kidding aside, we can rest assured by the end of the two-hour-plus runtime Deadpool will learn the true meaning of heroism and friendship, and Wolverine will realise becoming a mass murderer is a necessary stage in self-development, while showing he’s not too manly to tear up when circumstances demand. Bugs Bunny, who in his prime never stuck around for more than seven minutes, would have slunk away in boredom long ago.
Deadpool & Wolverine is released in cinemas on July 25.
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