Let’s be honest here: the superhero genre is dying a slow, painful death. While these movies and their beloved characters will never truly see a clear end, thanks to the overpopulated space that streaming and the multiverse have provided for them, what was once a genre that everyone went to the theatres to enjoy has turned into a mess. While superhero fatigue is often cited as the reason for the distance we feel from these movies as audiences; I’d double down on the fact that there’s just not enough heart put into these movies. Ever since Endgame, the MCU has felt like an extension of nostalgia bait (“Spiderman: No Way Home“) and bad CGI (pretty much everything in the last ten years). These movies now look like garbage and feel like they have lost their regenerating power. That is until “Deadpool & Wolverine,” a genuinely fun adventure that doesn’t take itself or anything else that ‘nerds’ have associated with the superhero genre seriously.
For one, Ryan Reynolds, who still feels like he was born to play Wade Wilson, a.k.a Deadpool, a.k.a The Merc with the Mouth, has been teasing this team up for years. Remember the small cut-out we saw on his face during the first Deadpool movie in 2016? The journey from there to having Hugh Jackman come out of his retired character to play along to the doozy, self-referential shenanigans feels like a true feat on its own. We all knew that Deadpool was a minor player in the MCU, so what director Shaw Levy does with “Deadpool & Wolverine” is truly funny.
The movie kicks off with the first major conflict in Wade’s life—i.e., him feeling insignificant in the comic book universe. Since his movies are R-rated, there’s no way the antihero can reach the same level as, let’s say, Tony Stark, Captain America, or even Thor. A major gripe for this has to be the Fox and Marvel conflict over owning the rights to X-Men. The insignificance was so large that, in spite of the 2016 hit, being a part of ‘The Avengers’ was never in sight for Wade. In the film, he is retired and has broken up with the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). His mid-life crisis of no-mattering has set in, and he has some major doubts about himself.
That is until opportunity literally comes knocking on his door. Paradox (Matthew Macfadeyn), a worker at the TVA (Time Variance Authority referenced directly to the Disney+ show “Loki”), summons him to his headquarters to tell him that his timeline is deteriorating because of the death of his world’s ‘anchor being,’ which happens to be James “Logan” Howlett (referencing the 2017 James Mangold film “Logan”). Paradox offers to relocate him to Earth-616, but Wade instead steals his TemPad in a quest to find a Wolverine variant that will help him save his timeline.
Now, there are some other conflicts that come in the way; one of them includes convincing ‘one of the worst Wolverine’ variants to team up with him and fighting Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the gang leader of The Void (a place where rejected mutants are pruned). But none of them truly feel like they are operating at a high stake. Now I know that stakes are not something that the Deadpool movies have ever been good at, and even though everyone involved in the movie knows this, it somehow makes the rift between good and evil or lesser evil and evil feel inauthentic. Corrin’s rendition of being the great Charles Xavier’s deadly sister is just something that never truly catches your eye. They feel like a minor element of the story instead of being the central antagonist.
The humor is razor-edged, mouthy, and vile, something you’d expect from a team of writers that includes Reynolds himself, but since it never gives you a chance to settle in with a gag before jumping to the next, a lot of it gets diluted in the transitions. Additionally, for a movie that takes a dig at the non-stop exposition in Marvel movies, the exposition in “Deadpool & Wolverine” is never able to explain why the TVA suddenly appears on Wade’s door other than assuming that we’ll be ready to just accept him as the next ‘big’ thing for MCU’s future. Also, Shawn Levy is not a master in directing action, so all the set-pieces feel like they are a combination of either the two leads walking in slow-mo toward the screen dripping with swagger or some unwarranted bloodshed that only feels good because they are set to the music that millennials will relate to.
That said, the surprising elements in the movie add a bout of charisma to an otherwise straightforward story. The cameos that the film rolls under its sleeves make you giddy with excitement at just how in love the movie is with the idea of superheroes and, to be more specific, the ‘X-Men.’ It works because the heartfelt homage that Levy offers to the X-Men, previously owned by Fox, is something to be proud of. I mean, they are the OGs of modern-day comic-book movies, and the team behind the film does a good job of presenting just how important they were to the blockbuster movie canon.
The chemistry between Jackman and Reynolds, which is a major highlight here, has transitioned beautifully from the real world to the comic-book world. So much so that I’d pay to watch them bad-mouth each other for another round or two. However, most importantly, “Deadpool & Wolverine” works because it is always aware of why you bought that cinema ticket in the first place. It knows that you are slowly getting bored of the numerous timelines and why the new MCU phase would dearly need someone like Wade Wilson and his wisecracking jokes to save it. I mean, the world’s always a little better when it is funny.
![Asking for It [2022] Review: An Extreme and Chaotic Representation of Female Vigilantism](http://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Asking-for-It-2021-768x432.png)