Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

I’ve got a soft policy here on the ‘cano not to review or talk about pieces of media unless I mostly liked it, because, look, I think that Ebert “hated hated hated” review is as funny as anyone, but in general, what’s the point?

But sometimes I impulse-watch something over the weekend and I’m struck by the need to just wave my hand at it and say: Really? This was the best idea they had?

So: Deadpool & Wolverine.

I guess I should say up front that I enjoyed it! It was a fun watch with a beer on a friday night, but then I made the mistake of continuing to think about it.

Of all the possible takes on a movie with this title, the one they went with was “they keep pointlessly fighting each other until they hold hands inside a Kirkland Signature Warp Core and become best friends?”

The really remarkable thing about this movie is the way they genuinely didn’t have a take on why those characters should be in the same movie beyond “it would be funny if they fought each other.” Or maybe, more to the point, no one involved seems to have had a second idea.

I don’t want to belabor this point too far, but we’ve got two characters whose defining trait is “doesn’t play well with others,” the the concept for the team up is… they don’t play well with each other? That’s it? The single most obvious thing, and then nothing else?

And the action isn’t even that interesting! Just bland, poorly shot, the same crap you see in any other mediocre direct-to-streaming schlock. At least Deadpool 2, which I also was “meh” on, was directed by one of the John Wick guys and knew how to shoot a gunfight. All three Deadpool movies have struggled with “how to make action funny”, a concept Jackie Chan had mastered by at least Police Story (1985), but this one is by far the worst. And it’s got that same endlessly bloodless digital fighting, where there are plenty of computer-generated squibs, but no one gets hurt, and the outcomes of the fights never matter.

I’m not a big-budget hollywood writer, but it seems to me, the funniest thing to do with a Deadpool and Wolverine team-up is to stick them in a situation they couldn’t solve by fighting? Just to pick a random scenario, this feels like the point where you send the main characters back in time to get some whales and make them have to figure out how to navigate modern-day San Francisco or something.

Instead, we get warmed over ideas from a show that ended a year ago, leading a rag-tag band of cameos from movies you’d forgotten into a big CG fight with no stakes. It’s just characters from other, better things talking about how exciting it is they’re on screen together, while providing ample evidence to the contrary.

This movie is a perfect example of what I mean when I say I think most movies would be better at one MPAA rating lower—I’m not opposed to swearing or fake gore, but both lose their effectiveness when there’s this much, it just becomes background noise. Imagine how much funnier if they had had to choose which one “Fuck” to leave in. Imagine if they had had to write punchlines for those jokes instead of just having Hugh Jackman grimace and say “fuck” again.

Ang, ugg, okay, I remembered this just as I was about to hit “Publish” so sorry about the janky segue from the previous paragraph, but my actual least favorite thing about the three Deadpool movies has been how they handled the character of Vanessa.

The marvel movies especially have always had an approach to human relationships that seems like it was written by aliens (see the seminal Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,) but the Deadpools are by far the strangest. Personally, I think Deadpool works better as a chaos agent with no confirmed “real life”, but I get where they were going with giving him a girlfriend. But, every movie they find some way to sideline the character, so that Deadpool is off trying to prove something she doesn’t know about. It’s the most “women only exist as prizes” take on relationships I’ve seen in a long time. Deadpool 2 was bad enough when they un-ironically fridged her while also making references to the run on Deadpool written by the woman who invented the term fridging, but this time they just… broke up? Because he’s not trying hard enough or whatever? So she shows up at the very start and the very end, and the rest of the movie he’s trying to “get her back” without having a conversation with her about, say, what she wants? Like, does Morena Baccarin charge by the word or something?

Also, “Deadpool tries to go straight and be successful in civillian life” also sounds like a phenomenal premise for a movie. Instead they burn that off in one scene and get back to the useless fighting.

This really feels like the final apotheosis of the marvel movies slide from “fun action movies” to “content.”

There’s no better example of how this movie works than its treatment of the TVA. As a show, Loki was mixed bag that ultimately refused to live up to its initial promise, but the one consistently great thing about it was the production design. The whole look of the TVA, the sets, the props, the costumes, genuinely S-Tier. And so when the TVA shows up in this movie they just… didn’t use any of it? The TVA office sets in this look like they’re from a mid-list Netflix show, not the second-highest grossing movie of the year. The TVA trooper costumes are all worse. They couldn’t even leave the sets up? Use the same costumes? Leave the plans somewhere the movie team could find?

There’s two possibilities here:

1. They didn’t care enough to get the real thing.
2. They couldn’t tell that their versions were dramatically worse.

Either one works as an explanation for this movie, at large.