At a certain point, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a lot more compelling than any of the stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For me, that point arrived during the end credits of the very first “Iron Man” movie in 2008. For the MCU itself, that point arrived with “Avengers: Endgame” some 11 years later, when the defining mega-franchise of the 21st century reached its most summative moment, smashed through the looking glass so hard that it shattered, and — to an even greater extent than it had thus far — began to re-center the miracle of its own success as its prevailing mythos.
That process inevitably led to the creation of a multiverse, which turned the MCU into a meta-textual jigsaw puzzle that could only be reassembled by looking for stray pieces off-screen. It didn’t take long before the sort of knowledge that used to enhance these movies became required to understand them, as blockbusters like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” were premised upon a working familiarity with the kind of corporate mishegoss (e.g. character rights, streaming ambitions, box office data) that only nerds and shareholders should ever have to know.
That pivot felt like a natural response to a moment in which the conversation around the culture had become fully inseparable from the culture itself, but the movies suffered without a grounding force of their own, and the ouroboros of it all triggered a degree of superhero fatigue that none of the Avengers were powerful enough to fight.
If only there were someone in that world — or at least adjacent to it — who could reconcile the emotional reality of the MCU with all of the extracurricular bullshit that had built up around it. Someone who could poke holes in the fourth wall as fluidly as Dr. Strange waltzes through the space-time continuum, use that special gift to repair his studio’s relationship with the masses, and happily adopt several decades’ worth of destructive corporate fuckery as his own cross to bear. If only there were someone who could get away with calling himself “Marvel Jesus” in a superhero movie, because the genre has frayed to a point where no one less self-aware could hope to redeem it.
Lucky for Disney, its decision to swallow 20th Century Fox like the Alioth has allowed Deadpool to enter the MCU. And lucky for Deadpool, entering the MCU — insert a painfully obvious anal sex joke here — has allowed him to evolve into something more than just superhero cinema’s obnoxious little brother. You see (and I hope you’re sitting down for this), Deadpool knows that he’s in the MCU. Not only that, Deadpool knows the MCU is in desperate need of saving. And not only that, Deadpool also knows that saving it might be his only chance to prove, both to the Avengers and the audience alike, that he isn’t the “annoying one-trick pony” (his words) that both of his “infuriatingly self-satisfied, satire for babies, I want to go back in time and strangle Thomas Edison in his crib-ass movies” (my words) made him out to be.
By that measure, Shawn Levy’s “Deadpool & Wolverine” is triumphantly half-successful — which makes it more successful by half than anything else Shawn Levy has ever directed. The good half has little to do with Deadpool as a character, as the Merc with a Mouth still combines the emotional pathos of a potato chip with the comedic range of a sixth grader who thinks he’s one gay joke away from landing an HBO special (even if this threequel’s complete lack of chimichanga-related humor suggests a subtle maturation).
On the contrary, it has everything to do with Deadpool as a conceit, as the character’s unbridled self-awareness makes him singularly well-positioned to remind “people” why they “loved” superhero “movies” in the first place. The endless reboots? The orphaned franchises? The naked transparency of exploiting an audience’s nostalgic allegiance to the characters they grew up with? “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a mega-budget Möbius strip of a movie that’s single-mindedly determined to twist those flaws into genre-defining strengths. Hell, the entire premise of its story depends upon its ability to reclaim casual audiences’ most consistent pet peeve: The fact that people almost never stay dead in these films.
I’ll give you the gist without revealing even half as much as the movie’s final trailer: Deadpool, who’s become so inextricable from Ryan Reynolds’ public persona that his reality-breaking reference to Blake Lively barely lands as a joke, is rejected from joining the Avengers and resigned to spending the rest of his days working as a used car salesman in a sad timeline where he’s single and sharing an apartment with an 80-year-old coke addict named Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). But hope avails itself when a cosmic middle-manager named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, doing a giddier and more British Tom Wambsgans) summons our hero to the Time Variance Authority and tells him that his entire universe will effectively be downsized out of existence unless he finds someone interesting enough to peg it to (that the gay jokes write themselves doesn’t stop the movie’s screenplay from being credited to five different people).
Deadpool couldn’t reach that bar if he were standing on a pile of money $785.8 million high, but Wolverine would definitely fit the bill. People love that guy. The only problem: In this timeline, he was “tree-fucked to death” at the end of “Logan,” a situation that Deadpool tries — and fails — to fix in an opening credits sequence that epitomizes the good, the bad, and the Levy of Marvel’s conceptually bold, artistically bankrupt, gleefully R-rated hail Mary to save its brand.
“How can we [exhume Hugh Jackman] without disrespecting Logan’s memory?” Deadpool asks us. Then he answers his own question: “We’re not.” Cue: Deadpool gleefully using the adamantium-covered bones from Wolverine’s corpse to dismember a small army of day players as he dances to NSYNC’S “Bye Bye Bye.” The action is flimsy and garish, the joke is beaten to death harder than any of the bad guys, and the punchline is that Deadpool has cracked open Pandora’s Box (don’t hold your breath for any wisecracks there, Kevin Feige only agreed to butt stuff). Like so many scenes in this movie, the basic fact that it’s happening is funnier than anything that actually happens in it.
Anyway, the upshot is that Deadpool has to bop around to some other timelines in order to find a Wolverine that he can drag back to his own, a montage-fueled quest that comes to an end when he settles on the worst Logan in the multiverse: A volatile alcoholic who wears his trauma as heavily as the iconic yellow suit that he refuses to take off (a film critic pointing out the fan service in this movie would be like a fish rolling its eyes at the sight of water). Alas, something happens — I honestly can’t remember what — and our mismatched frenemies are sent to the colorless desert wasteland where unprofitable Marvel characters go to die and/or get memory-holed, a purgatorial nightmare ruled by a psychic mutant who dreams of turning every timeline into the Void. Her name is Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), she’s Charles Xavier’s twisted little sister, and her sick ambition represents the existential threat facing Deadpool’s entire genre. Superhero Movies: Imagine the World Without Them.
It’s a credit to Levy, the writers (Levy, Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells), and the very extended cast they had at their disposal that I didn’t spend the entire film actively rooting for Nova to succeed, even if I definitely reached a point where I was hoping that she would fail a lot faster — a point that arrived long before Reynolds turned to the camera and assures the audience that it’s almost over. “Deadpool & Wolverine” might be plotted with all the care and precision of a dream someone had at Comic-Con while they were sleeping outside in the line for Hall H, but Reynolds and co. find enough connective tissue between the constant ejaculations of fan service to keep things wadded together.
The cameos are spectacular in a way that will resonate with anyone who’s been going to the multiplexes over the last 30 years (one of them left me laughing in tears), and the best of them are lovingly extended into genuine supporting roles. The logic is seldom coherent and the plotting never more than a thin excuse to put these characters in the same place, but “Deadpool & Wolverine” squeezes a ton of mileage from turning the memories of 20th Century Fox into an island of misfit toys — one that allows some of the biggest punchlines and abandoned promises in superhero movie history to get the second chance that no other genre could ever hope to give them.
The actors who embody that opportunity embrace it with their entire hearts, delivering a handful of endearingly hilarious performances that feed off the meta-textual nature of their existence in order to create real feeling out of film industry nonsense. It’s like watching a production of “Our Town” where Deadpool has been cast as the Stage Manager, standing off to the side and letting a series of ghosts tell a story that only really needs him for running commentary — and to engage in an occasional stab-fest with Wolverine, the two immortals fighting to bleed an entire movie out of the deathless sparring match that made Jack Sparrow’s climactic duel with Captain Barbossa feel like such a waste of time in “Pirates of the Caribbean.” True to form, Levy completely (and I mean completely) wastes Wolverine as a character, but Jackman himself is able to be a frequent source of delight; the emotional payoff at the end of his performance has nothing to do with the Logan he plays here, and everything to do with how the movie allows the actor to come full circle with the Logan he played in the first “X-Men.”
As painful as it can be to watch Reynolds mug for the camera and belabor all of his worst bits while the director of “Free Guy” uses Marvel’s remaining money to put his own spin on “Mad Max” (an inexplicable effort made that much worse by the choice to name-drop “Furiosa” in a sauce-less Disney product that will probably outgross George Miller’s masterpiece in blowjob popcorn bucket sales alone), “Deadpool & Wolverine” rescues something kind of beautiful from the ugliness that superhero movies have perpetuated for so long. Not visually, of course — though setting most of the story in a place called “the Void” at least makes this impossibly drab-looking spectacle feel like it achieved its target aesthetic — but in several other key respects.
No one is ever worthless, despite what the Rotten Tomatoes scores might suggest. No one is ever beyond salvation, even decades after the world has turned its back on them. No one is ever truly dead, at least so long as people still have love for them in their hearts and/or they’re willing to let Ryan Reynolds make jokes about penetrating them from behind.
These sentiments would feel plastic in a vacuum, but the context of their genre allows them to be relocated into a messy spandex myth several decades in the making, and in doing so endows them with the weight of several Hollywood lifetimes. “Deadpool & Wolverine” tells us that the multiverse doesn’t matter beyond its ability to give everyone the ending they deserve.
Yes, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long been more compelling than any of the stories told in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and — in the process of reconciling those two stories as only Marvel Jesus could — Deadpool makes a very persuasive case that this should be the last superhero movie ever made. It won’t be. It already isn’t. The best we can probably hope for is that “Deadpool 4” is similarly willing to die for all of the sins that its genre will commit between now and then.
Grade: C+
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures will release “Deadpool & Wolverine” in theaters on Friday, July 26.
