This piece contains spoilers for Deadpool & Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine starts with a good idea.
Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) pulls Deadpool into the TVA, he’s about to destroy Wade’s universe, but he wants the Merc with the Mouth to join the “Sacred Timeline” AKA, the MCU (why he wants this is never explained, but alas).
This framing positions Paradox as a metaphorical stand-in for Disney, stripping the Fox X-Men universe for parts and scrapping the remains. This is a strong idea, the villain is Disney! Deadpool isn’t just fighting for his friends, he’s metaphorically fighting against Disney, fighting for the salvation of the Fox Universe, and all the baggage that comes with it. How does Deadpool & Wolverine reckon with its own existence?
Well, forget all that, cause the film certainly does.
D&W seems to realize that it might be accidentally wandering into territory that could be critical of its Disney overlords and quickly pivots, throwing the titular characters into The Void, a literal wasteland of superhero garbage, where the only thing blander than the cameos is the cinematography.
Here’s where a movie like, I don’t know… Deadpool could actually have some fun satirizing the current cameo-climate currently ripping its way through superhero media. But Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a satire of anything. Jennifer Garner’s Elektra appears, but it’s not a joke about how superhero movies are so hungry for cameos they’ll bring back even the most derided of duds.. no, it’s played incredibly straight. “Look, we got Jennifer Garner back, isn’t that cool!”
Beyond a few easy softball jokes, D&W is completely uncritical of cameo culture, begging its audience to cheer for every new one that’s rolled out. Tyler Mane returns as Sabretooth from X-Men (2000), and Deadpool calls out something like “folks have been dreaming about this rematch for 20 years". No they haven’t, that’s not true.
The philosophy that D&W eventually settles on is, “cameos are good because it gives these characters an ending they deserve”, and it timidly walks this line right up until the ending. Deadpool defeats Cassandra Nova (oh, right, there’s an entire new villain I haven’t mentioned because they immediately throw Paradox away. Nova’s whole deal is her tortured sibling relationship with Charles Xavier. No, Charles Xavier is not in the movie, why would he be?) and prevents his universe from being destroyed. Except, no he doesn’t, not in the real world. They’re not suddenly going to start make new X-Men movies in the old universe again, Wade’s universe is dead, he’s changed nothing. We can now imagine that the universe goes on and everyone gets a happy ending, but there’s no reason we couldn’t have done that already.
Deadpool never ideologically defeats Paradox (mainly because Paradox is not given any reason to be doing any of the shit he’s doing) and therefore the movie never answers its own ideological questions, ending up as a completely hollow work of empty fan-service and laziness. For many fans this won’t matter at all, they got to see Hugh Jackman again! Blade was in it! But I think that its not too much to ask that a movie should actually try to be good.
Deadpool & Wolverine was in a unique position to question and undermine the value of the shallow, cameo-driven slop that has been clogging cinemas over the past few years, but it had no interest in doing that. It ends up as just another example of that lazy approach to filmmaking. It uncritically throws cameo after cameo at its audience, like sticking an iPad in front of a crying toddler. Corporate synergy playing to thunderous applause.
More Thoughts on Deadpool & Wolverine
The film has one of the most aggravating soundtracks of all time. It plays a different “ironic” cheesy hit every 5 seconds in a never-ending quest to stop the audience from having any time to think about how little sense any of this makes
Speaking of, Deadpool’s universe is dying because Wolverine was an “Anchor Being” who’s death in Logan is causing the entire universe to unravel. How does a universe survive for the billions of years before an Anchor Being is born? Who knows. Wasn’t Logan set in the future, so Wade’s Wolverine isn’t dead yet? Yep who cares.
I’m still laughing at Paradox asking Deadpool to join the MCU. Why the fuck does he do that? What reason could he possibly have?
I cannot stress enough just how ugly the film’s visuals are. It looks so bad.