Look, I Laughed

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t particularly good. But it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might submit anyway. Photo: Jay Maidment/20th Century Studios/MARVEL

Right before he and Wolverine have their first big fight in Deadpool & Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool asides to the camera, “Get your special sock out, nerds. It’s gonna get good.” It probably doesn’t matter that what ensues is an uninspired mishmash of neck-slicing, heart-stabbing, and other blood-spurting blows — neither of them can die, you see, so the violence is basically meaningless. No, what matters is Deadpool’s address to the camera, which pretends to insult its putative audience even as it flatters us, making us feel like we’re in on a great big joke along with him.

This is, of course, the Deadpool Way. He’s supposed to be the foulmouthed, gutter-minded, fourth-wall-breaking goofball of the Marvel empire, a darling to both comic geeks and those who imagine themselves above the superhero fray. He delivers fan service even as he undercuts the whole enterprise. “They call me the Merc with a Mouth,” he insists at one point. “They don’t call me Truthful Timmy, the Blowjob Queen of Saskatoon.” Look, I laughed. I also laughed when he mocked Hugh Jackman as Wolverine for finally wearing his classic yellow-and-blue costume: “Friends don’t let friends leave home looking like they fight crime for the Los Angeles Rams.” The half-anguished, half-delighted, orgasmic yawp emitted by some in my audience when Wolverine finally donned his pointy-eared helmet suggests that the film knows how to hit that fan sweet spot. Special sock, indeed.

Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t a particularly good movie — I’m not even sure it is a movie — but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it. The picture arrives, of course, at a fallow time for Marvel, after a string of duds and an abortive attempt to introduce a new superhero phase following the climactic, stage-clearing (and absurdly lucrative) battles of Avengers: Endgame. It’s something of a relief that this new movie isn’t trying to reboot or revamp or extend or set the stage for anything. (There is a good joke about how it ties into a specific episode of Loki, and it probably does, but I’m not gonna bother to find out.) Honestly, it appears to exist solely to make money. The film tries to wink its way out of its nonsense plot — a convoluted setup that involves Deadpool finding a live Wolverine in another universe so that he can save his own universe before it’s destroyed by a mysterious organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA), led by an extremely hammy Matthew Macfadyen. It acknowledges its own cravenness, and that transparency can be preferable to stolid sincerity.

At least for a while. “G’day, mate, there’s nothing that will bring me back faster than a big bag of Marvel cash,” Deadpool chirps in a Jackman-adjacent Aussie accent early on, when it looks like Wolverine will remain as dead as he was at the end of James Mangold’s Logan. (These characters appear to exist both as real superheroes and fictional creations played by real actors. It’s best not to think too hard about it.) When Wolverine does eventually come back, Deadpool greets him casually with “Welcome to the MCU, by the way. You’re joining it at a bit of a low point.” I can’t remember if he said this while standing against the ruins of an old 20th Century Fox logo in a blasted desert dimension called the Void, where useless things go to die; perhaps that was a later scene. I’m pretty sure, though, that he said this some time after he turned to the camera and yelled, “Suck it, Fox, I’m going to Disney World!”

You get the idea. There are approximately 296 other similar jokes where that one came from. (“Make it stop!” “Mangold tried!”) At times, it feels like Deadpool has only two flavors of humor: knowing digs at the industry that spawned him and sex jokes. (“I’m going to show you something. Something huge.” “That’s what Scoutmaster Kevin used to say.”) Occasionally, it’s both: “Pegging isn’t new for me, but it is for Disney,” he says when he first sees a bunch of TVA soldiers and thinks they’re a gang of male prostitutes someone rented out for his birthday. These are funny the first few times, but after a while you wonder if maybe he should attempt some new material.

But that would go against the ethos of the character, who is supposed to be annoying and one-note. Indeed, that’s sort of why Wolverine wants to beat his ass, and Jackman, to his credit, can still make that character’s rage palpable. In their second, far more entertaining fight, which happens entirely within the confines of a Honda Odyssey, the stakes suddenly feel genuine, because Jackman briefly brings something resembling gravitas to this silly lark of a movie. He acts circles around his co-star, whose lack of range was a handicap during the decade-plus that Hollywood was trying to turn him into a leading man. Reynolds never could convince us of his characters’ sincerity in those dry years — which is why the snarky Deadpool wound up being his biggest, and probably best, role. And this movie seems to recognize that what it’s really doing, aside from bringing together two of Fox’s biggest assets under the Disney banner, is colliding the cheekiest Marvel hero with the most unsmiling. The cheekiness, of course, wins. “Want to talk about what’s haunting you, or should we wait for a third-act flashback?” Deadpool asks the grim Wolverine. It’s no spoiler to reveal that we get exactly that in the movie’s third act.

Speaking of spoilers, the picture is replete with some welcome cameos that Disney has done an exceptional job of hiding. I won’t ruin those, but I will reiterate that when the TVA sends our heroes to the Void, they wind up in a world of useless things. Even the cameos are digs at the superhero industry. Watching them, I did wonder if I was reacting to the actual performances and incidents onscreen — which are, by and large, totally indifferent — or if I was just responding to the surprise of seeing them. In other words, is it the movie or the marketing? For better or worse, we live in a world where that question has ceased to matter. Deadpool probably would have a joke to make about that. Oh, wait, he does. It’s this film.