It’s Marvel’s ultimate nihilistic sequel.
Laughing at Deadpool & Wolverine is the juvenile moviegoer’s way of pretending to have fun, while ignoring that Marvel panders to them mercilessly. Mixing comedy and mayhem, the Deadpool movies reboot the Marvel X-Men series, reconstituting the alter ego of Wade Wilson (a doomed cancer patient mourning his wife’s murder) as a masked antihero whose superpower is that he’s unkillable. As one of Marvel’s New Mutants (introduced in the 2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine), he has a pockmarked “avocado” face that shows the ravages of illness, and he therefore is not to be taken seriously. He can be repeatedly brutalized, satisfying the bloodlust of a teen audience, because everything can be laughed off.
Even the fact of Hollywood exploitation becomes a joke in the way Deadpool & Wolverine reunites Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) with his superhero antagonist Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), even though the latter was killed off in 2017’s Logan. Marvel itself mocks its audience’s susceptibility by bringing back characters, including many Marvel-hero cameos, against narrative logic, simply to make a buck. (The term “fan-service” is Hollywood’s euphemism for exploitation.)
Plot convolutions involving a Time Variance Authority (TVA) controlled by evil Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) allow for numerous inconsistencies — not paradoxical facts of being and nothingness, just a setup for Deadpool’s interminable, rude, self-reflexive jokes. Smart-alecky Deadpool winks at the audience about Wolverine’s resurrection: “Fox killed him. Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s 90.” Reynolds co-wrote this obnoxious script with Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells, and the real subject here is not the mystery of existence across time and dimensions, but the cynical exaggerations of showbiz venality.
Instead of contrasting Deadpool and Wolverine for their slick-vs.-rough approaches to crime-busting, this film leaps past good-vs.-evil. Marvel abuses the storytelling and story-reception process (entertainment), merely to twist and distort young people’s sense of morality and power. Deadpool’s incessant joking and breaking the fourth wall does not make us sophisticated, just jaded. It’s for nerds who like to think they’re sophisticated. Constant sarcasm saves fans from the emotional embarrassment of Zack Snyder’s sincerity in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The beauty of coherent meaning that gives Snyder’s films their emotional richness is gone. Nothing in Deadpool & Wolverine means anything. Does this cynicism epitomize the unchecked polarization that drives our media and politics?
Marvel’s recycling of its basic plot elements proves that the makers care only about product and manipulation. The buddy-movie bickering in Deadpool & Wolverine parallels current political chicanery — destroying logic, decency, rules. Deadpool himself is like a politician, the ultimate cynic (hopefully the last cynic). In Deadpool 2, he had relished Wolverine’s death (impaled and lying on a rotating disc like an old vinyl record). Now, after the two men canoodle, there’s a mawkish finale meant to invoke purpose and principle.
The Deadpool character cheats audiences of any moral basis. Behind his Spider-Man-like mask, he’s a throwback to Reynolds’s breakthrough in the title role of the sophomoric National Lampoon cult film Van Wilder (2002), in which he played the arrogant, anarchic libertine college pimp. Now, in the MCU multiverse, Reynolds upstages the stalwart Wolverine’s Neanderthal mutton-chop sideburns and adamantium claws by unleashing nonstop pubescent sex jokes (“Get your special sock out nerds. It’s gonna get good!”), gay jokes, and jokes about “pegging” (look it up at your peril), along with topical references (recalling Deadpool 2’s pointless Jared Kushner joke).
Snarkier than any actor of his generation, Reynolds makes Deadpool & Wolverine his career blockbuster. Demeaning every ideal that pop culture once represented, it’s the ultimate nihilism in comic-book-movie form. Director Shawn Levy stages the cartoonish violence with less verve than David Leitch’s in Deadpool 2, which featured the franchise’s paradigmatic transition — from the close-up of a sphincter to a human eye — making the point that this is all excrement. Deadpool & Wolverine proves that Marvel capitalizes on a market of obnoxious, smart-ass adolescents (and adults) insatiable for sarcasm.