Deadpool & Wolverine: a tiresome attack of cameos and superhero snark
There’s no shortage of comic book in-jokes, but the convoluted multiverse premise causes Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman to get lost in their own film, competing with cameos and multiple versions of themselves.
Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, was initially a parody of DC comics villain Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, who has featured in live-action and animated films and TV shows but has long since been eclipsed in pop culture by the comedy cover version.
If another massive IP amalgamation takes place, there’d be mileage in a grudge fight between the licensed jester of Marvel and his presumably fed-up inspiration. Instead, this film settles for matching a Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool with a Hugh Jackman Wolverine on the basis that the stars and characters are the most popular, commercially viable survivors of 20th Century-Fox’s run of Marvel adaptations, which extends from X-Men (2000) to The New Mutants (2020). .
Trailing after multiversal epics Spider Man: Far From Home (2019), the Spiderverse films and The Flash (2023), Deadpool & Wolverine has the Deadpool of Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018) try to save his dying reality by importing a variant Wolverine from another universe to replace the hero, who had his last stand in Logan (2017), which leads to the mismatched pair being stranded in a wasteland dimension inhabited by discontinued characters.
While No Way Home picked up abandoned iterations of the Spider-franchise to add complexity and emotional depth, this mostly pokes fun at comic book movies which didn’t work out. When Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire stepped out of dimensional portals into Tom Holland’s universe, they were warmly greeted; when Jennifer Garner’s Elektra – seen in the Fox film Daredevil (2003) and her own spin-off Elektra (2005) – shows up here, she gets ribbed for the fact few liked the earlier films, with a snarky aside easily read as a dig against one-time Daredevil/Garner’s ex-husband Ben Affleck. The limbo of written-out or written-off characters runs to crowd-pleasing returns for folk we didn’t know we’d missed. A stroke of genius has a high-profile Marvel star cameo to utter the wrong famous catch-phrase (to which he is still entitled) then streak off to battle an underrated X-Men villain who has a complimentary super-power.
A risk is that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman get lost in their own film, competing with cameos and multiple versions of themselves. There are a lot of dud Deadpools in limbo and a gag pre-empted by the Spiderverse. Jackman’s Wolverine is not the one introduced in X-Men and killed in Logan (2017) – that version appears only as adamantium bones used for weapons in one of too many scrappy fight scenes used by director Shawn Levy to fill stretches between in-jokes and proper jokes.
Despite gags about bringing smuttier, edgier material to the Disney-approved MCU, this is more concerned with tidying up Fox/Marvel’s messes. The film’s villain, played with splendid seriousness amid snark by Emma Corrin, is Cassandra Nova, created by writer Grant Morrison for the first run of X-Men comics. Alongside the end credits are clips, outtakes and on-set larks from the whole run of films – oddly poignant after a whole universe has been wound down. If there’s to be a legacy of the Fox films in subsequent Marvel movies, it might make more sense to retire the grumpy, self-satisfied, frame-breaking unkillable Canadian mutants and retain the much-needed menace of Corrin’s Nova, an evil Professor X counterpart.
► Deadpool & Wolverine is in UK cinemas now.