With half a billion dollars in the bank within a week of its global release, “Deadpool & Wolverine” has proven reports of the superhero genre’s demise greatly exaggerated. Its success is no surprise. Ever since Disney finally decided on a July release date in the wake of the writers and actors strikes, Shawn Levy’s film has been projected as the one nailed-on smash hit of an otherwise uncertain summer — and a shot in the arm for a Marvel Cinematic Universe that, following the dismal performance of last year’s “The Marvels,” had slightly lost its commercial luster.
How could it miss? Unlike some other comic-book mashup movies, “Deadpool & Wolverine” brought together two characters — and, in Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, two stars — who were already cast-iron brand names in their own right. Folded into the MCU from the superhero stable of 20th Century Fox, following Disney’s acquisition of the latter, Deadpool and Wolverine are figures at once contrasting and complementary: wiseass comic schtick in one corner, sternly brawny machismo in the other, with a disparity between them that is the stuff of age-old buddy-movie tradition. Their on-screen pairing thus layers entrenched screenwriting formula atop the most strategic of corporate mergers. It’s Brand Synergy: The Movie, as diagrammatically calculated a blockbuster as Hollywood has ever made.
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If that sounds cynical, the filmmakers would hardly object to such a description: “Deadpool & Wolverine” thoroughly owns its own cynicism, to the point that it’s the punchline of the entire movie. Again and again, as in Deadpool’s previous two screen outings, the script — the five writers of which include Reynolds himself — breaks the fourth wall to draw the audience’s attention not just to its status as a movie, but as a hand-me-down studio product. “Welcome to the MCU, you’re joining at a bit of a low point,” Deadpool quips to an incarnation of Wolverine pulled from a waning multiverse of options. Earlier, he bemoans Marvel Studios’ never-say-die approach to movie franchising: “Marvel is so stupid. How are we going to do this without dishonoring ‘Logan’s’ memory? We’re not.”
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That reference to the well-regarded 2017 film that had, until now, been Wolverine’s rather poignant big-screen swansong underlines the very different rules of the new corporate realm into which the character has been resurrected. In “Deadpool & Wolverine,” nothing is sacred, nothing is finite and nothing much matters as a result. This cavalier attitude toward storytelling integrity and artistic purpose is a joke that is connecting in a big way with the film’s target audience: For patient Marvel fans who have stuck with a tangled network of superhero franchises through thick and thin, it perhaps feels validating to hear some admission of error from on high.
As an agnostic viewer considerably less invested in genre lore, I should have been laughing along too. And yet something in “Deadpool & Wolverine’s” slick self-mockery struck me as too derisive to be funny. The longer the film simultaneously implicates itself in, and excepts itself from, the craven opportunism of Disney sequelitis, the more hollow and joyless an experience it became. There’s something self-congratulatory in the film’s supposed subversiveness, as it takes the mick out of its corporate overlords with every confidence that it’s going to make them a metric ton of cash anyway. With far more emphasis on its metatextual referencing than its threadbare save-the-world (or at least save-the-timeline) plot, “Deadpool & Wolverine” admits at every turn to being a tenuous, business-minded Disney cash-in. But if the studio’s on board with the satire, and it’s our money being taken, who’s really the butt of the joke?
All of which is to say, counter to Wade Wilson’s teasing, Marvel isn’t so stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing here, and “Deadpool & Wolverine” fulfills its brief absolutely, if not elegantly, in marrying the glib snark of the first two “Deadpool” films to the smilier, tidier sentimentality that is the MCU’s modus operandi, and leaving an ever more beleaguered-looking Wolverine as its tonal go-between. (Reynolds recently described it as “the first four-quadrant R-rated film,” which is an apt encapsulation of its covering-all-bases ruthlessness.) Compared to such recent, flailing superhero-movie flops as “The Flash” and “Madame Web” — films which didn’t even have proficiency going for them, much less acute postmodern zeal — I can’t honestly call the film a failure on its own terms.
But I can question how worthwhile those terms are to begin with. Strip away all the copious self-reflexive quote marks from “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and it’s a thinly imagined, boilerplate superhero episode that gives us precious little to love, to feel, to dream about — and itself even less to build on in the sequels and spinoffs that will, with crushing inevitability, follow.
Little invention or ingenuity has gone into its haphazardly strung-together battles, the limited (super)human stakes driving them, or the grimy, sub-“Mad Max” purgatorial void in which they take place. Emma Corrin’s cut-glass villain barely registers as a threat or a foil to Deadpool and Wolverine’s expensively maneuvered partnership; a gaggle of cameoing stars from the Fox superhero archives are introduced and summarily abandoned, there simply to tap an extra reserve of fan nostalgia. (And in some cases, to poke fun at their own second-rate big-screen treatment in the past.) Any sense of visual or physical spectacle is, it feels, deliberately shrunk to avoid earnestness: The film’s most enjoyably eccentric flourish, a large-scale fight scene choreographed to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” still functions principally as a snickering nod to Deadpool’s proclaimed (but only superficially detailed) queer identity.
“Deadpool & Wolverine’s” meta-upon-meta-upon-meta posturing is hardly unprecedented in contemporary Hollywood, as films like “The Lego Movie” and last year’s daffy smash hit “Barbie” have also resorted to intricately self-referential comedy to stand as both independently imaginative art and corporate brand maintenance. But Levy’s film might just have staked new territory in its winking acknowledgement of the creative bankruptcy that has shaped its very existence. In a year where the 11 top grossers so far are all sequels or franchise extensions of some variety (you have to go down to John Krasinski’s disappointing “IF,” in 12th place, to find a notionally original title), the film’s blithe candor in that regard makes it nothing if not of the moment. But there’s surely only so far this glib irony can take you. How much longer can Marvel sneer at its own legacy before audiences crave stories that don’t merit such contempt?
