Deadpool & Wolverine Finds the Fun in Corporate Compliance

The Deadpool films have always felt a bit dated. Their brand of humor—snarky, self-referencing, tickled by ironically repurposing pop culture ephemera—feels born of the late 1990s or early 2000s, closer to the inception of the comic book character than to his 2016 standalone film debut. And while the first two films in the series were quite popular, hailed by many as correctives—or, at least, necessary complements—to a glut of superhero movies that took themselves a little too seriously, there was always that nagging out-of-time quality, barring the Deadpool films from true relevance.

Now, six years after Deadpool 2—and five years after the film’s studio, Fox, was bought by Disney—the fast-talking mercenary has returned with a timelier and more specific sense of mission. Deadpool & Wolverine (in theaters July 25) has a story to tell—not so much about how Deadpool and the other famous Marvel character in the title team up, but about the sale of a studio and the death of a motley era of movies. Directed by Shawn Levy and written by Levy, star Ryan Reynolds, and others, Deadpool & Wolverine both appeals to nostalgia and revels in disdain for blockbuster flotsam. Its target: all the Fox superhero movies made before Disney united those disparate characters (from X-Men, Fantastic Four, and others) with the rest of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Thus this is a movie about acquisition and IP, housed in a mostly nonsensical dimension-skipping tale of regret and legacy (but in a funny way). It’s a bit like if an episode of the Hollywood business podcast The Town was adapted into a comic book film. The film’s gaze is narrow and insider-y, but it somehow kind of works. Deadpool & Wolverine is an amusing reflection on the recent cultural past, and a half-cynical, half-hopeful musing on what its future might be.

It’s also bloody and profane, as Levy travels far afield of his more family-friendly fare like Free Guy and Night at the Museum. His direction seems invigorated by the stylistic shift; action sequences in Deadpool & Wolverine have a pleasing snap, a purposeful physics and momentum that differentiate the film from much recent superhero slop. Brash and loud and rambling as it often is, Deadpool & Wolverine was made with some actual consideration for texture and tempo. Sadly, that counts for a lot these days.

Reynolds is, as ever, caustic and voluble, alternately irksome and charming. For every few strained and wheezy one-liners, there is a clever bit of wordplay that lands. Reynolds has been steadfast in making the character an equal opportunity offender, which can rob him of a cogent point of view. But there is also something merry and refreshing in this scattershot approach: an element of surprise.

In this installment, Deadpool’s chattering is meant to be hilariously offset by the gruffness of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine—a performance we’ve seen him give in nine other films. Jackman is always a welcome screen presence, but here Wolverine’s trademark laconicism makes him perhaps too recessive. The sparring between the silly goose and the tough grump that has been a centerpiece of the film’s marketing never quite sparks; their fight scenes are equally underwhelming, repetitive and terribly hampered by both characters’ invincibility. It’s tough to care when none of it means anything.

What really livens the film is its many harkenings back to movies of old—and by old, I mostly mean from the last 25 years or so. Cameos abound, which is often a sign that a movie has only cheap party tricks up its sleeve. But in Deadpool & Wolverine, these many familiar faces are somewhat thoughtfully woven into the texture of the film, shrewdly employed to evoke laughs, both sentimental and snide. The film’s deluge of pop relics is strangely potent, perhaps especially if you are an old Millennial like myself who was exactly the right age when the movies being referenced were first released.

It’s almost poignant, this sifting-through of an epochal past, one more innocent and slightly less synergized. Were we ever so young? Deadpool & Wolverine teases these tarnished and, in some cases, forgotten objects. But it does so with a loving huff of appreciation for their role as scrappy forebears of the very machine that is now sucking Deadpool and the rest into its maw.

Gradually, though, those wistful pangs of longing for the turn of the century harden into a glumness. Why are we watching a movie about studio acquisitions and licensing rights? Why do any of us know about any of this? Deadpool & Wolverine does a disarmingly effective job of convincing its audience that this is a film about nostalgia for beloved characters when it’s really just bridging a gap between one company’s output and another’s, smoothing the way for ever more integrated product. And it does so with a plot that is likely unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t seen at least the first season of the Disney+ series Loki. So that is Deadpool’s latest assignment: doing marketing for a streaming service.

Of course, the ever-meta Deadpool is hip to that compromise. He teases Disney, and the suits who run it, and the current sorry state of the MCU. But Deadpool & Wolverine does as it’s told nonetheless, wryly tossing itself into the vat—because what else is there to do? It’s all good, compliant fun. What is perhaps troublesome, though, is that audiences are being asked to cheer on what amounts to a mere transfer of assets.