Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Let me take you to a film with old familiar friends

Spoiler Warning

I laughed A LOT.

And before I say anything else, if you haven’t already seen the movie, I highly recommend you do before getting spoiled on anything because it is a film which deserves for its cameos and surprises to be moments of absolute glee.

Where to begin?

Deadpool & Wolverine is a wonderfully fun film which is a nostalgic trip through the Fox Marvel franchises.  It is a fitting final outing for the Deadpool we’ve seen in the trilogy while introducing the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a way that doesn’t feel jarring.

There really isn’t a lot of substance to the story.  It is an outline, a frame, something within which Deadpool can be united with Wolverine, fun cameos and great action can happen, witty banter can be made, and they get to save the day.  Because it’s an outline, for me, the villains remain two-dimensional for all they service the plot as villains, and the emotional beats lacked punch. 

I gave The Marvels (2023) pretty much the same criticism, but I think there are key differences that make this movie work much, much better than that one. 

Firstly, there are only two leads allowing their enemies-to-buddies relationship to take centre stage and to gather depth from meeting, through fighting each other to fighting together.  The end sequence of them together saving the day feels earned.  Of course, some of that is because the audience has been waiting since X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) for this team-up and it does not disappoint at all.

Second, the stakes for each character are clear and personal because they give Deadpool and Wolverine actual motivations.  This is where some of the emotional beats are played out – Wolverine’s guilt at not saving his X-Men and going too far in his vengeful response, Deadpool’s need to save his world, (that world being defined as the 9 people who he loves). 

Third, they never pretend like the villains’ motivations are down to an emotional angst.  Paradox (nicely played by Matthew MacFadyen) wants the Time Variance Authority to go back to the old way of doing things (clearly post Loki the TVA didn’t practice good change management), and Cassandra Nova wants to ensure she remains the most powerful person in her world (the Void) without interference from outside.  While they do hint at Nova being a little moved by Wolverine’s insistence that Charles would have loved her, (some great face acting by Emma Corrin), it is a fleeting moment with the rest of it given over to revelling in her villainy.

Fourthly, there aren’t competing narrative threads here – for all it is a thin narrative, it’s a cohesive single arc with Deadpool and Wolverine, and no sub-plots.  Because of that I feel they strike the tone and balance better between the dramatic emotional beats and the comedy.  Where the film struggles is in balancing everything sufficiently to create the depth needed for those emotional scenes to land for me as effectively as they might have done had there been one less action sequence, one less cameo, one less break of the Fourth Wall.  Still, maybe for some of the audience those beats will have landed with the emotional punch intended.

So, while the story is flimsy, there is just enough in the character motivations and in the primary plot to make the whole thing work.  And while the plot is paper thin, it is dressed up with lots of very fun banter, buddy moments, action and cameos.

It is hilarious.  I haven’t laughed so much in the cinema in a long time.

Ryan Reynolds is in very fine form as he revisits the character.  He talks almost non-stop.  His commentary is funny and meta, breaking the Fourth Wall often.  For a man who spends a lot of his time in the mask his Deadpool performance is heartfelt and heart-warming. 

As is Hugh Jackson’s performance. This is a Wolverine variant, different from the one that died in Logan (2017), with his own issues and yet still fundamentally wanting to be better because Charles once believed in him, and X-23 believes in him too.  He plays the straight man to Deadpool’s funny guy, and it works like the comic book brought to life.

Their performances really sell the buddy aspect of this movie and that really helps to deliver the feeling that they’ve earned the cheers in their saving-the-world scene.

Action sequences are great throughout, very bloody and gory.  That’s not my thing so I winced quite a few times, but I can’t deny that the choreography was great and that there was a real sense of ‘ouch, that had to hurt!’ in the fights.  The music choices were inspired and used to punctuate the action with humour beats that made them fun rather than simply violent.   

The thing that takes this over-the-top fun wise though are the cameos.  There are smaller cameos done for fun (fan service casting, for example) or larger cameos which play a bigger part.  There is a hilarious one as they get to the Void, which I will not spoil, but it’s just a wonderful piece of misdirection that uses the audience’s expectation to work.  There is a team-up of different superhero characters which works well too – they give those characters a fantastic outing.

Unfortunately, the recurring Deadpool franchise characters don’t get a lot of screen time and are really relegated to cameos themselves.  But it’s hard to see how this story would have worked with more of them in the mix so it was no doubt a hard decision, but it worked for the movie.

My only real unhappiness with the movie is how much it reuses footage in places from past movies, particularly in the emotional scenes where they were clearly attempting to capitalise on the old footage to tug on the audience’s heartstrings in lieu of creating the depth themselves within this movie. Reuse of footage is becoming a trend in the MCU in order to tell general audiences of past events across movies and TV shows that have gone before.  I can see why they’re doing it, but I’m not a fan.     

In conclusion:

I had a really good time at the movies with this film and it does have a great re-watchability factor.  It doesn’t have a strong narrative, but it has just enough story to hold everything else together, great performances from its leads, and it’s definitely the best multiverse story we’ve had from the MCU since Spiderman: No Way Home (2021).