Deadpool & Wolverine

Here is the only review you need if you are for some reason on the fence about whether or not to go see Deadpool & Wolverine. 

Did you see the first two Deadpool movies? Did you think the jokes and cameos were funny? 

If yes, go see this. 

If no, then don’t. 

And one more thing. How upset will you be if a 2024 Deadpool movie makes fun of the 2017’s Logan, the swan song for Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine? 

A lot? Like, really, really upset? 

Yeah, you should skip this. 

Just do like I do about another franchise, and just say to yourself there is no Ghostbusters after Part 2 or in your case, there is no Deadpool & Wolverine. 

If you still go see it you can console yourself with the fact that Jackman is really good in this and turns in another all timer performance as Wolvy. 

Sometimes we just get lucky and the universe smiles on us and we get the right actor or actress with the right part. Jackman or Patrick Stewart as Professor X or yes, Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson. 

There is, I suppose, a much longer conversation we can have about comic book movies and Deadpool’s place in them and what any of this means to the culture and why most critics hate this thing. 

I’ll tell you a story about a comic book movie I hated. 

I gritted my teeth and suffered through this grimdark Marty Scorsese inspired fairytale about a crazy loser who finally succeeds in life by voicing his desperation to the world and killing someone on live tv. 

When I got outside I said, “Well, that is the movie the trailers promised you.” 

And then I laid down in a gutter and cried while it rained on me. 

I was not upset that Joker made a billion dollars at the box office but remain concerned about the people who think something like that and to a lesser extent the whole Snyderverse, is what we should do with the comic book characters who populate some of the coolest and most interesting stories on the planet. 

Shorter version, I probably should not have gone to a movie I suspected I would not like. 

If you went to the third Deadpool movie, got this, and are in some way upset about it I have to suspect that you either are very foolish with your money or aren’t an honest critic of movies. 

This is very much the movie I expected, it very much made me laugh and the audience I saw it with had a great time. 

My only real surprise? That Deadpool had to pledge allegiance to how awesome The Avengers are and that he desperately wanted to be a member. 

Feige is no dummy and nobody joins the MCU without paying the toll kids. Just ask Tom Holland. 

Does it have stakes? 

Oh my goodness no. How do you have stakes with a movie where the main character constantly breaks the fourth wall in the way that Deadpool does? 

Where anything that may present a danger is examined, regurgitated and then turned into a meta joke? 

Impossible. 

It has no more stakes than the first or second Deadpool movies. Or a random episode of South Park. It’s not considerably better than those movies or wildly different. Wolverine takes over the grumpy friend role once occupied by Cable. 

The villains exist only to for Deadpool to make fun of them. The plot is an excuse for the jokes and the cameos. 

It’s like writing an honest critical review of a Three Stooges short. You either think the eye poke is funny or you wish you had gone to a Marx Brothers movie. 

There is no option three. 

Either you think Reynolds still has his fastball or you don’t.

This flick has been presented in some corners as a loving tribute to the Fox superhero movies. And I didn’t much care about that one way or the other. 

I think most of those movies were bad and I think the studio and the writers and directors who made most of them had a lot of contempt for comic book creators, fans and the characters.

There were some good ones there sure but there were a lot of terrible decisions made by people who thought they shouldn’t have to make these kinds of movies for the people who dared to love them.

Happiest moment for me as a comic book fan is when Disney bought Fox. It’s taken a lot longer than I expected but we may finally someday get a good Fantastic Four movie. 

If they could get the Spider-Man characters away from Sony I would forever pledge my allegiance to the Mouse and sit through all the crummy live action remakes of cartoons they want to foist upon me. 

That’s just who I am. I like what I like. 

This is a Deadpool movie you wouldn’t expect to get if you spent any amount of time reading Deadpool comics. That should be axiomatic.

The thing that shows up in movie theaters resembles to a large extent the thing people liked in the comics.

But studios that aren’t controlled by Feige still make trash like Madame Web.

The reason the MCU worked, the real secret sauce, is that Kevin Feige and his teams, have usually respected and understood what fans liked about these characters and stories in the first place. 

They never made a movie about the world’s biggest Boy Scout and had him be depressed for the whole thing until he kills a guy at the end.

They never looked at Deadpool and said, “Let’s sew his mouth shut.” 

And from the first one until Endgame I think they were almost all very good. There were some stinkers in there to be sure but there was no movie that got made that embarrassed me or that fundamentally missed the spirit of the characters. 

And, I’m not going to relitigate the last five years of MCU tv and movies with you. I think most of them were better than people seem willing to acknowledge but I will also admit that audiences haven’t shown up for these things in the way that they used to. 

Sooooo, if you were wondering what some critics of Deadpool & Wolverine are really mad about the answer is not the quality of this movie. 

It’s not the plot, or the action or the cinematography. They’re mad because after Barbenheimer and Dune they really thought they had won some kind of cultural argument and that the MCU was done. 

They don’t just hate these movies, they hate that they even exist and they hate that sometimes lots of people enjoy them. They hate that they make a lot of money. 

They thought Deadpool would be silenced by a timid mouse. They thought Wolverine was dead. 

They lost.