Warning: This post contains spoilers. Sorry, this movie has been out for a month and a half and grossed a shitload of money, so if you were wanting to see it, you’d seen it already.
The Deadpool movies always acted in a very subtle way like parodies of superhero movies. In his two-star dismissal for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico said the first Deadpool “is the cinematic equivalent of that kid in school who would always say how much he didn’t care what people thought of him, but just loud enough so everybody could hear him. It is the teenager who pretends to be too cool to care, but wants you to like him so badly it hurts.”
That was eight-and-a-half years ago when we were just realizing that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing and all superhero movies were leading to something bigger. Ergo, it’s funny how the titular character played by Ryan Reynolds who also goes by Wade Wilson comments how the MCU is at a low point right now. I’m sure Disney and Marvel executives look back at that Phase Four trailer with Stan Lee’s voice-over as a wonderful showcase of what might have been if the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes and basic superhero fatigue didn’t all happen.
The 1980s gave us six Police Academy movies, eight Friday the 13th, five Nightmare on Elm Streets and four Halloween movies. Eventually, people get enough of a trend. When I interviewed writer Charles Sasser, he said trying to keep up with trends is hard is always changing especially if you’ve just finished a manuscript that you can’t sell to a publisher. Look at how the John Hughes movies went from teen-based, to a short period of being adult-based before finding money as family-friendly movies all withing a 10-year time frame.
The X-Men franchise collapsed with Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix and Jon Watts, who helmed the wonderful Spider-Man: No Way Home, walked away from the Fantastic Four movie. And for good reason. He couldn’t do any better than he had done with No Way Home, which acted like a nice coda to the first two Spidey franchises and a segue into the new era for the MCU.
That being said, even the title itself is a sly homage to the ill-fated Batman & Robin which nearly ended all superhero movies back in 1997. The first one is a parody of origin superhero movies and even romcoms. The second is a parody of sequel even with the stereotypical killing off of Vanessa Carlysle (Morena Baccarin) in the first act. This one is a parody of all third movies that go bigger and usually worse. I mean, look at Superman III, Batman Forever, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, and the gaudy RoboCop 3. Even the short screen time of Vanessa and other characters we’ve come to love is how sequels often push established characters to the background. I mean, there was criticism on how little Evangeline Lilly was in Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania even though her titular character made it look like she was going to have a bigger role like the first two movies.
The movie opens in 2018 before the Snap as Wade travels from Earth-10005 to Earth-616, aka the “Sacred Timeline” where he’s trying to get Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) to hire him on as an Avenger. But that doesn’t happen. Depressed even though he saved the lives of Vanessa and Peter Wisdom (Rob Delany), he feels he can do more. Over the next few years, things get worse as Vanessa has dumped him and he’s working with Peter at an automobile dealership wearing an obviously fake toupee.
However, on a surprise birthday party, the Timeline Variance Authority brings him to Paradox (Michael Mcfadyen) who leads an organization that monitors Earth-616 and wider multiverses. Earth-10005 is deteriorating due to the death of an “anchor being,” Logan (Hugh Jackman). Paradox wants to use a time ripper to advance him. But Wade realizes they’ve gone rogue and are not operating in accordance with the official TVA. So, he manages to steal Paradox’s TemPad so he can find a worthy Wolverine.
Of course, this is after he digs up Logan’s grave because he doesn’t believe he’s dead. This leads to one of the movie’s best sequence and you’ll never listen to ‘NSync’s “Bye Bye Bye” again. Mainly, Wade/Deadpool goes through numerous timelines including one where Wolverine is the actual height he is in the comics and another where another superhero actor plays the character. However, I wish Dougray Scott had appeared, considering that it’s because filming went over on Mission: Impossible 2 and Scott was unable to leave Australia to go start filming as Wolverine on the X-Men movie in Canada.
Wade/Deadpool does track down a worthy Wolverine only to discover he’s the worst of all the timelines and a drunk. Arriving back for the TVA, Paradox sends them both to The Void, which is a purgatory-like wasteland out of some Mad Max style movie. Here things are ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who is the twin sister of Charles Xavier, and others are consumed by the Alioth, a dark-cloud entity that consumes all living things it can.
There’s also some subtle meta-humor as you can see half of the famous 20th Century Fox logo buried in the dirt. And the Void is also the place where all the bad and rejected comic book adaptation characters went. Chris Evans pops up as Johnny Storm in a hilarious small role. Evans turned Steve Rogers/Captain America into the world’s biggest Eagle Scout who didn’t like hearing foul language. But people may have forgotten one of his earliest roles was in the Fantastic Four movies and he played Johnny Storm /The Human Torch as kind of a douchebag.
And there’s Eric Brooks/Blade (Wesley Snipes), Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner) and Logan’s daughter, Laura Kinney/X-23 (Dafne Keen) who help Deadpool and Wolverine battle Cassandra. It’s a complicated story but I did like the addition of characters who we may have forgotten about but I won’t mention. And Corrin does a great job turning Cassandra into a worthy villain.
When the movie devolves into the standard big brawl/battle in the third act, here it can be expected because this has been a common problem with some superhero movies, especially the MCU. But it wouldn’t work if Jackman and Reynolds didn’t have the right chemistry. Part of my main problem with the role in previous movies is that Jackman was instructed to play the character like the stereotypical loner.
He has some depth in the role with Logan which worked because the character wasn’t doing that scowl that seemed to consume most of the role. And even for a superhero movie, Jackman does some great acting. With a hard R rating, it has at a record-breaking 118 uses of the F-bomb for the MCU. The only previous time it was used once in the third Guardians of the Galaxy. The foul mouths between Jackman and Reynolds work as two men who get along in real life trying to play two characters who despise each other.
And since both Deadpool and Wolverine have the abilities to rejuvenate and heal themselves, they get down to one moment where they basically spending hours slashing each other fighting. This is an ode to the infamously bad X-Men Origins: Wolverine in which Reynolds played the role but they made Deadpool look totally different. While Reynolds has so much fun wise-cracking, as one of the writers he manages to give the character some poignant serious moments. (A sidenote to this, filming was still ongoing during the WGA strike. However, Reynolds couldn’t ad-lib as he does because id t could go against the rules.)
I know a lot of people have criticized the cameos and casting. But Deadpool doesn’t play by the rules. At one point, Wade runs and grabs the camera to bash 20th Century Fox. The joke is that Wade knows he’s in a movie and one of my friends has compared the movies to the style of Mel Brooks who was always breaking the fourth wall. I even think the confusing plot is intentional as the much hated (even though I liked it) She-Hulk series ended with the character breaking through the streaming service of Disney-Plus as the climax seem to delve into the typical barroom brawl.
I’m going to theorize that even though Logan is set in 2029, five years from now that the TVA views time a different way the way in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim could see into the future and his own death, but knowing it’s not preventable. No one has bothered to look into the physical impractical way Scott Lang can’t ride a small ant but still have strength to take on other characters. If it was so, the second he jumped on an ant to ride, his body would break right through it.
This is another collaboration between Reynolds and Shawn Levy as director. But unlike the disappointing Free Guy, this actually has some excitement and doesn’t reduce Reynolds’ character to a supporting character. And it’s a better improvement over The Adam Project. Reynolds has said this is probably the last time he will play the character, even though there is the hint that he will appear as he’s shown with Thor who’s crying in an undetermined timeline. (And considering that many of the post-credit scenes haven’t been addressed in any subsequent movies, anything is possible.)
Deadpool is the character you either like or hate. And yes, he does have that type of loud proclamation way of acting like he wants everyone to know his opinion. But that’s how people can relate to Wade/Deadpool. But it also acts as a way for Jackman to get some redemption from those earlier X-Men movies where it appeared some filmmakers didn’t know how to handle the character. I mean, he’s only 5-foot-3 in the comics and now we see how bad that would be to portray accurately. However, he does look good in the yellow, black and blue costume. It only took them 24 years and 10 movies to get here.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 