Deadpool & Wolverine

★½

In the six years since we last saw Deadpool, a lot has changed. The once-monolithic Marvel Cinematic Universe has stalled in creative limbo, the superhero craze itself is slowly sputtering its dying breaths, and Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox brought the merc with a mouth and his mutant pals to the mouse house. It’s an uncertain time for a franchise that used to pride itself on developing a years-long plan and sticking to it. With “Deadpool & Wolverine,” director Shawn Levy and the film’s four other writers attempt to jolt the MCU back to life with a proven recipe for mainstream financial success: reintegration of familiar IP within new contexts! Hooray?

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is hardly a film. It’s hardly anything. It lacks a firm story, has no discernible stakes, and possesses zero emotional pathos. It is a string of loosely-connected bits, regurgitating familiar characters and scenarios from other media with the nuance and delicacy of a sledgehammer. 

The pretext for all this is simple. Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has hung up the red spandex and lives a bland life of non-superhero mundanity. But when the Time Variance Authority (from “Loki” on Disney+) informs Wade of an immediate threat to his entire universe, he must reluctantly team up with an even more reluctant alternate-universe still-alive Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) to fight to save those he loves. The pair is promptly thrust into the Void (also, yes, from “Loki”), a flat environment free of time where all long-forgotten multiverse anomalies from any number of timelines or competing studio cinematic universes wind up.

What this translates to in practice is a vapid merry-go-round of recognizable faces, names and references dressed up to look like a film. Behind the key-jangling of returning actors, “Deadpool & Wolverine” has almost literally nothing going on. The loose and meandering journey Wade and Logan embark on through the Void to return home is a manufactured excuse for Cameo Fest 2024, lacking in any narrative momentum or dramatic tension, serving only to provide reason for rounds of pointing and clapping. It feels written backwards, what little story exists having been built around successful contract negotiations to include A-list talent. Levy and Reynolds put the cart before the horse, and then beat the horse dead and kept going.

Because really, “Deadpool & Wolverine” taps into a previously unimaginable level of desperation. Nostalgia used to, at the very least, be for things that we once liked, but here, Levy gleefully parades around the lifeless corpses of things we were once so eager to leave behind. It’s nostalgia for things we didn’t even like, and in some cases, nostalgia for things that have never even existed. No, it’s not enough to have seen every project in the MCU, nor is it enough to have experienced every up and down in the inconsistent Fox-verse canon. “Deadpool & Wolverine” plays directly to the Hall H comic-con fanboys who devote themselves to the inside baseball of corporate entertainment news. Do you remember when they were gonna make a movie about that one character and that one actor wanted to play that character and they said that actor would play that character and then that actor never ended up playing that character? I sure do. Clap now, please.

This would be an especially cynical reading of a self-aware summertime action-comedy if it weren’t the premise the entire film is predicated on. But beyond the brand celebration and masturbatory corporate cheerleading, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is also entirely incompetent as a mindless R-rated superhero comedy. It managed to eke out a handful of genuine laughs from me, but otherwise, Deadpool’s specific brand of foul, self-aware humour has never been more grating. It’s almost impossible to keep track of how many punchlines are simply dirty words, while jokes at its own expense, and the expense of superhero franchises as a whole, feel reigned-in and neutered. Under Fox, Deadpool took no comedic prisoners, while here he reveres the glory of the almighty MCU while tamely poking fun at it.

Emotionally, there’s even less to write home about. Wade’s arc has him learn to fight for others and alongside others, rather than take on the world by himself. Ryan Reynolds might have potentially had something to work with here had this not been Wade’s exact same arc in “Deadpool 2.” Meanwhile, the film resurrects Hugh Jackman’s compelling portrayal of Wolverine by pulling a gruff, day-drinking variant from another timeline, where the tortured hero is forced to grapple with his past failings and learn that he still has the capacity to be a hero. Attentive viewers may clock that this is the plot of “Logan.”

Though the film may begin with a direct-to-camera assurance that the integrity of the Academy Award nominated “Logan” would remain untouched, “Deadpool & Wolverine” prances on Wolverine’s grave both figuratively and literally. The return of Jackman aside, the film routinely works to undermine the value of Logan’s sacrifice, particularly by its egregious conclusion.

And then there’s that the film is simply ugly. Bland, lifeless imagery incapable of evoking any form of emotion, designed to display what is literally happening in front of the camera and nothing more. Painted atop its digital car commercial sterility are some of the most offensively garish and unfinished visual effects work in a film of this budget. The whole thing’s an eyesore. Director Shawn Levy has no artistic vision for how this will all come together, so besides being soullessly captured, the film is also sloppily constructed. The action is potentially exciting but is distractingly edited and framed. Levy requires the audience to infer much of the cool factor, cutting around wide-shot coverage to make a scene flow, but by so doing robbing the action of its thrills and immediacy. It becomes white noise.

The shameful part is that the movie is designed to be this way. “Deadpool & Wolverine” doesn’t have to be an especially good movie to appease the core fanbase, and Levy and Reynolds know this. Pesky things like character arcs and emotional stakes and narrative and artistry just get in the way, and won’t yield any results from the target demographic that couldn’t be achieved more potently and effectively by name-dropping an X-Men character from the early aughts, or showing a clip from “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in the deep background. Like a hall of mirrors, “Deadpool & Wolverine” exists solely to reflect all of its own IP back into itself; a collapsing star of brand recognition and corporate synergy. This is downright embarrassing, a sorry state of affairs for the biggest blockbuster franchise on the planet. It’ll also probably gross over a billion dollars.