"Deadpool & Wolverine" (With Spoilers)

This is your final spoiler warning.  Ready?

Okay, so we've been inundated with nostalgia-mining multiverse movies for a couple of years now, including "Flash" and "Spider-man: No Way Home."  The reason one worked and the other didn't was because Marvel is really the only studio with the deep well of IP, the resources, and most importantly the clout to actually make these kinds of movies work.  Henry Cavill and Chris Evans will say yes to them.  They have the deep pockets and knowhow to make ridiculous things look kinda plausible.  They will commit to an iffy idea so hard that it seems like a stroke of genius by the time they're through.

And in "Deadpool & Wolverine," the one thing that absolutely works is paying homage to Fox's (and New Line's) Marvel films, without which the MCU may not have been possible.  Kevin Feige said yes, because that's where Kevin Feige got his start in superhero movies.  So did Ryan Reynolds, not in "Wolverine Origins," but in the third "Blade" movie where he played a scruffy vampire hunter named Hannibal King.  An unbelievable amount of resources have been spent on a movie with jokes so obscure that only a handful of people on the planet will get them.  Tons of younger viewers must have been scratching their heads when not-Captain America suddenly burst into flames, and Channing Tatum showed up as Gambit.  And it works because the whole point is giving a little love and attention to versions of the Marvel superheroes that have been forgotten - Blade, Elektra, the 2005 Fantastic Four lineup, and alumni from a lot of bad "Wolverine" movies - before Marvel Studios goes off and reboots everything.  It's not a full-scale tribute to all of these movies, or else we would've seen far more X-men participation, but to the real cast-offs and afterthoughts.  And there's something sweet about that.  

The rest of the movie is very serviceable, and very slickly produced.  Director Shawn Levy knows how to do funny spectacle, and there's plenty.  Aside from the R-rated content, this feels like a typical MCU film, just sort of glibly bouncing from one fight scene and bit of nonsense exposition to the next.  The story doesn't add up at all, but it's only here for joke scaffolding anyway, so why complain?  I think it's important to point out how little of the MCU actually gets used here, despite Deadpool fanboying the Avengers.  We see none of the marquee characters for more than a few seconds, though concepts from the "Loki" television series enable most of the multiverse-hopping.  This is in line with how "Deadpool" movies are supposed to function, however, operating on the extreme margins with tertiary characters like Happy Hogan and Wunmi Mosaku's Hunter B-15.  I expect more of the same from any forthcoming sequels.  

Jackman and Reynolds are great at the Odd Couple bickering, which turns into some very entertaining carnage, and I wish that they could've gotten the character arcs a little better sorted out.  I was mixed on the prior "Deadpool" films - the first one worked for me and the second one didn't - but there was very, very little that gave me any emotional stakes in what Wade was doing this time out, and some of the running jokes like Peter and Dogpool had me checking the clock.  Conversely, I liked the "worst" Wolverine, and I thought that nearly everything about the character worked - Jackman's performance, the costume (and the cowl reveal!), and the slow recovery from self-loathing and trauma.  I disagree that having Laura and Logan sharing a serious scene undermined the end of "Logan," since this clearly wasn't her Logan.  

  

I thought the movie had surprisingly strong villains.  Paradox is too good of a slimeball not to come back again at some point, right?  Matthew MacFadyen is such an entertaining weasel.  And then there's Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova, who is genuinely one of my favorite MCU villains.  She's so viscerally creepy and unsettling, and the depiction of her telepathy as feeling around in people's heads is prime nightmare fuel.  Her execution of Johnny Storm was wisely played for laughs as much as possible, but is still one of the most horrifying things we've ever seen in a superhero film.  If Cassandra is really dead, I hope Emma Corrin ends up back in the MCU in some way in the future.

I've never seen a film with so much fanservice jammed in, and was happy to enjoy multiple Wolverines and Deadpools, the right costumes, the wrong costumes, and nostalgic needle drops at every turn.  Whoever put together that credits montage and set it to the Green Day song that played at every late 90s graduation deserves a medal.  Finally, of all the alumni, I think I was happiest to see Wesley Snipes as Blade again, looking actually happy to be in the movie.  I'm glad that Channing Tatum got his chance to play Gambit, even if it was a very exaggerated version for comedic purposes.  Frankly, he looked totally ridiculous and I kind of love him for it.  

---