Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

After thirteen weeks of priming the pump with re-viewing and reviewing the thirteen Fox X-Men films, I thought I was as excited for Deadpool & Wolverine as I could get. Then I heard that film critic Mark Kermode was comparing the film to the fall of the Roman Empire, and my anticipation went through the roof. While that might not seem like a compliment to anyone else, I recall hearing that same sentiment from Kermode upon the release of the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, which Kermode likened to “the collapse of western civilization.” 
 
I was excited because At World’s End happens to be my favorite of the five Pirates films, and I feel similarly high about Deadpool & Wolverine, a love letter to twenty-five years of occasionally unloved superhero films that somehow manages to have its Marvel cake and eat its Fox cake, too.
 
Hitting a midlife slump, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) is searching for his purpose when he draws the attention of the TVA and their regional supervisor, Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen). In order to save his timeline from being destroyed, Wade suits up as Deadpool and recruits the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) for a multiversal road trip, where they run afoul of the telepathic mutant Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). 
 
It’s become almost cliché to be surprised by a Deadpool movie having a heart, but there is a very uncynical joy and affection at the core of Deadpool & Wolverine. Not unlike Zack Snyder’s Justice League, there is a profound sense that this particular movie wasn’t meant to happen. The film is littered with second chances and reminders of second chances, and right at the center of it all is the ghost of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The last time Reynolds and Jackman shared the screen together, it didn’t quite go so well, but in the intervening fifteen years Reynolds has built up enough popular capital to give the team-up another try. Never mind that Jackman’s Wolverine is supposed to be dead, and disregard the corporate changeovers that have put the mutants on the back burner. (Forget that Deadpool 2 was six years ago, too.) When Deadpool tells Wolverine how much he’s meant to him, it’s not just franchise puffery; we can actually hear Ryan Reynolds’s sincerity behind the words.
 
Reynolds continues to prove he’s just about the only person who could play Deadpool, but Jackman, too, has not missed a step. It’d be spoiling to say how and why Wolverine returns, though the movie is adamant (if outright impertinent) about insisting that the events of Logan did happen. Nonetheless, Jackman does check a few boxes you hadn’t realized he’d missed, and the wry jokes about his inability to retire have new oxygen, given this weekend’s news about Robert Downey, Jr.
 
No one’s more respectful of spoiler culture than I am, and so there’s a lot I can’t discuss. Suffice it to say, though, Doctor Strange walked in the Multiverse of Madness so that Deadpool & Wolverine could run. There were surprises I expected, surprises I didn’t predict, and at least one that made me gasp in my seat. (All right, two, but for entirely different reasons.) Of the performers we’re allowed to acknowledge, Emma Corrin is sinister and delightful as Cassandra Nova, whose powers are icky and squishy in the best way. Cassandra is the perfect villain for a story like this, perhaps a little too weird for the Fox films but one of the better untapped antagonists of the X-Men comics. (Mister Sinister, we’re still waiting...) And Matthew Macfadyen is fun as Mr. Paradox, channeling all the smarm of his Succession stint while feeling at home in the TVA milieu established by the Loki series; budget aside, there’s a plausible reason why we don’t see Owen Wilson or Ke Huy Quan, but I’d love to see either walking the hallways with Paradox in the future.
 
I’d have a great deal more to say about Deadpool & Wolverine if I could speak freely, but so much of the fun of the film is the unexpected zigs and zags, the surprise cameos, and the plot points you didn’t see coming. The inciting incident for Deadpool’s self-reflection, for example, hits early and brilliantly, and there are at least two sequences that will make you long for a pause button (and, as Kevin Feige has teased, a feature on Disney+ to see comic book inspirations in a pop-up window). I clocked most of them, I think, and it was the kind of endeavor that made me glad I’d put in the work. Sure, I didn’t need to have seen all the X-Men films; I didn’t need to have read all sixteen years of Chris Claremont’s X-Men in a single year. (It was a pandemic; we all needed a project.) But those labors of love pay off in Deadpool & Wolverine, which shares with its zealous audience a diehard devotion to these four-color heroes. Look no further than a heartfelt mid-credits sequence – which, this being a Deadpool film, serves also as the straight man for the post-credits rimshot.
 
I laughed, I clapped and stomped my feet, I felt my heart leap. (I didn’t cry, though almost a little bit from laughing so hard.) This has not been true of all the recent Marvel films – a fact on which Deadpool is all too keen to hang a lampshade – and with superhero films at large settling for the middle tier of “just fine,” it’s a pleasant surprise to see a film as ecstatic as Deadpool & Wolverine. It is, I guarantee you, not the film you’re expecting, but it is so much more – particularly quantitatively. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to agree with Deadpool in dubbing him “Marvel Jesus,” but I’d venture to say that it is the second best since Avengers: Endgame (which, I’ll remind you, was five years and eleven films ago). 
 

Deadpool & Wolverine is rated R for “strong bloody violence and language throughout, gore, and sexual references.” Directed by Shawn Levy. Written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, and Shawn Levy. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, and Matthew Macfadyen.

Cinemutants - The New Mutants (2020)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2020, it’s The New Mutants. After a disaster that destroys her home, Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up in an abandoned hospital run by Dr. Cecilia Reyes (Alice Braga), who is attempting to rehabilitate a group of dangerous young mutants. Dani befriends Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams) before they discover that something in the hospital is trying to kill them and the other mutants – Illyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga) and Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton).

1. Prepping us to be X-Men. I almost forgot about The New Mutants. I thought I’d miscounted my weeks when I saw Deadpool & Wolverine was still a week away. But I’d only seen New Mutants once, at home, three years ago, and while I felt wildly underwhelmed the first time, I felt a little bit sad that the X-franchise ended while on the verge of really trying something new. Not unlike the creative shot in the arm given when Chris Claremont introduced the team in 1982 (seven years into his run), The New Mutants felt a bit like we might finally stray away from the core team and explore other mutant characters, with a brand-new antagonist to tie both teams together in the end. But The New Mutants underperformed, Disney bought the franchise, and this one went from bold new beginning to forgotten coda, shelved and reshot for three years before a quiet mid-pandemic release. For a brief moment, the marketing for the film boasted that it was actually an entry in the MCU, but Marvel and Disney were quick to refute that claim.
2. Sum en limbo omnipotens. The casting in The New Mutants is mostly serviceable, with Hunt and Williams showing a remarkable amount of chemistry despite never quite feeling like their comics counterparts, Mirage and Wolfsbane. Yet Anya Taylor-Joy positively crackles as Illyana “Magik” Rasputin, the sister of Colossus. This iteration of Magik has a severe chip on her shoulder and a predilection for less-than-PC dialogue, but especially by the third act, when Magik cuts loose with her Soulsword and her dragon familiar Lockheed (previously and cleverly depicted as a hand puppet), one sorely regrets that we didn’t get more movies with her. (Whether she’s the sister of the Colossus we meet in Deadpool is one more mystery left sadly on the shelf.) She’s one casting holdover I would welcome into the MCU (or even a quick cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine), but I’m certain we’ll see genre darling Anya Taylor-Joy in some Marvel role before long.
3. A sinister future (reprise). It seems almost appropriate that trickster diva Mister Sinister gets yet another anticipatory tease that never materialized. An early draft of the film had Storm running the hospital in Professor X’s stead, and the final film certainly wants us to think that the X-Men are involved until a second-act reveal. Since New Mutants was filmed around the same time as Apocalypse and then deferred until after Deadpool 2, it’s little surprise to learn that the shady hospital is one more arm of the Essex Corporation, a fact neatly foreshadowed by Dr. Reyes’s diamond-shaped lapel pin. We also see Dr. Reyes pack a vial of blood into a suitcase just like the one we saw in the post-credits scene of Apocalypse. And for eagle-eyed viewers, we get a quick glimpse of footage from the child experiments in Logan, suggesting that Sinister might even have had his fingers in that scheme. (It muddles the timeline a bit, unless The New Mutants is set after Logan’s death, at which time there weren’t supposed to be any new mutants.) With the Essex House in Deadpool 2 taking in wayward mutants, it was all building to a big showdown with Mister Sinister, the unseen architect of the New Mutants’ pain.
4. So, we’re free? The film ends (spoiler warning?) with the New Mutants leaving the hospital, beginning a twenty-mile trek back to civilization. Evidently, this film was to be the first in a trilogy integrating the New Mutants into the X-franchise writ large, with a second film bringing them into contact with Warlock and the Technarchy, an alien race of techno-organic mutants. (We’d probably also have seen Doug “Cypher” Ramsey, a frequent partner and translator for Warlock.) By the third film, Mister Sinister would have made his proper debut, putting the mutant world through a film version of the “Inferno” crossover, which brought demons and the Goblin Queen into conflict with the X-Men. It’s hard not to imagine this Inferno as a kind of X-Men: Endgame, uniting the disparate subfranchises, but it might just as easily have become another Days of Future Past, struggling (in vain) to make sense of a newly-muddled timeline. Disney’s purchase of Fox, and the advent of a forthcoming Mutant Saga, put all those plans to bed. But still, it ain’t over until the TVA sings...
5. Checking in with the MCU. I don’t have too much more to say about The New Mutants, other than to wonder what might have happened if this film’s horror vibe were to run afoul of the Shadow King on Legion, a mutant-adjacent show that played with genre much more successfully. Maybe it’s time for a different kind of new mutant round-up. By my count, the MCU has brought us four, with only one living in the main universe of the Marvel Cinematic Multiverse. We’ve got Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) as the first confirmed mutant, with some ambiguity about whether Namor (Tenoch Huerta) from Wakanda Forever is also a mutant. (He is in the comics, but I don’t recall the movie weighing in.) On parallel worlds, we’ve met versions of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and a Binary version of Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch). While those three are probably being saved for a forthcoming Avengers multiversal film, I’d wager that any of them is fair game for Deadpool & Wolverine – depending on where Monica Rambeau landed in her fall through parallel worlds at the end of The Marvels. And of course, doors open from both sides, so who will Deadpool bring with him when he makes his way to Earth-616?

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did you ever see The New Mutants? If so, what do you remember about it? Up next, we’ll all see Deadpool & Wolverine for the first time. LFG, indeed.

Cinemutants - Dark Phoenix (2019)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2019, it’s Dark Phoenix. A daring rescue mission in space brings Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) into contact with the mysterious Phoenix entity, a powerful force that has the power to destroy or recreate the universe. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) leads the X-Men in trying to help their teammate, while a shapeshifting alien (Jessica Chastain) pursues the Phoenix for her own ends.

1. Last of the First Class. Dark Phoenix is entirely aware of its position as the grand finale for the Fox X-Men films, and more particularly for the sub-franchise that began in 2011 with First Class. Set now in the early 1990s, it becomes increasingly impossible to believe that these characters have aged 30 years; Michael Fassbender’s Magneto wears a few wrinkles around his eyes, but everyone else seems a spry early-30s rather than approaching (at minimum) 50. It feels as though the movie can’t introduce much in the way of new material, stuck as it is with characters like Storm, Nightcrawler, and Quicksilver, who don’t have much at all to do in the plot. Instead, the movie knows it’s an ending, and so it ties up as many plot threads as it can; mutants live, mutants die, and Xavier and Magneto play one more game of chess as the credits roll.
2. X-Women. In the eight years since First Class, Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar, helmed her own Hunger Games franchise, and became the highest-paid actress in the world. Consequently, her presence here feels continuously compulsory, and you can practically hear her breathe a sigh of relief when (spoiler warning) Mystique dies early in the second act. Her leadership of the X-Men is an intriguing prospect, a far cry from the source material, but it comes with the grievously on-the-nose dialogue about changing the team name to “X-Women.” Granted, the women have almost always been the best developed characters, particularly under the pen of Chris Claremont (who cameos here), but the sentiment drew a derisive laugh in the theaters. Mystique says it to be profound and defiant, but Deadpool had, only a year earlier, made satirical mincemeat of the gendered team name. It’s a weird note, then, on which to start a movie about the X-Men’s most powerful woman.
3. You are not broken. I’ll say this for Dark Phoenix; as boring and underbaked as the movie is, Sophie Turner is never quite bad in it. With a different script, she might have been a Phoenix for the ages, but this movie feels like another speedrun through the X-Men’s most iconic storyline. Where it took Chris Claremont four years and around 40 issues, both The Last Stand and Dark Phoenix try to knock it out under two hours. I have no doubt that the MCU will eventually, inevitably, take one last swing at “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” but my biggest advice would be to slow down, give the story room to breathe, and develop it as a proper three-act tragedy that impacts the universe, not just Jean’s boyfriend Cyclops. Given that Turner never got to be reborn as the Phoenix, it would be nice to see her once more in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I rather doubt it; with Hugh Jackman in tow, a cameo from Famke Janssen seems much more likely.
4. Gap. Although no one really believed him, Hans Zimmer claimed to have retired from superhero movies after Batman v Superman. A scant three years later, he was back for Dark Phoenix, and thank goodness, because he’s one of the only performers who doesn’t seem bored. Indeed, Zimmer’s score elevates the picture and ends up being a fantastic listen when divorced from the film. (I should know, considering how often I’ve got Zimmer playing around me!) Case in point, in one of the film’s major action sequences, the X-Men struggle to cross the street, but Zimmer plays it like the definitional conflict of an era. The film’s final battle sequence, aboard a speeding train, is a little stronger, even as Zimmer continues to shred at eleven, all pounding percussion and swooping melodies. Like so many casting decisions and plot points in this franchise, one wonders what Zimmer could have done with a truly terrific film around him. If nothing else, one of the best comic book worlds now has a Hans Zimmer theme to hum while you read the latest issue.
5. A new beginning. One almost feels a pang of regret as Dark Phoenix ends. The film’s final moments propose a few interesting ideas, including Hank McCoy as headmaster of the newly-formed Jean Grey School. But with the very first movie set in 2000 or thereabouts and Dark Phoenix landing in 1992, the film’s erstwhile prequel premise became a sort of asymptote, approaching and imitating the original films but never quite lining up with them. So we’ll never find out, for example, whether “Stewart or McAvoy?!” was Deadpool’s Professor Xavier or what became of Weapon X Wolverine after his Apocalypse cameo (or will we?). And while the film’s final frames imply that Jean’s still out there as the Phoenix, there’s no post-credits scene and no indication that Disney intends to do much of anything with the First Class timeline. Before the TVA arrives, we can safely consider this timeline pruned.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: did the First Class timeline overstay its welcome, or should the Phoenix rise one more time? Up next, you might have forgotten that Dark Phoenix wasn’t actually the last Fox-verse film. You can’t be blamed, because I never formally reviewed The New Mutants... until next week.

Cinemutants - Deadpool 2 (2018)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.
 

This week, from 2018, it’s Deadpool 2. After a personal tragedy, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) finally enlists with the X-Men before running afoul of the time traveler Cable (Josh Brolin), who has come from the future to stop a killer before he murders Cable’s family. With his methods meeting the disapproval of Colossus (Stefan Kapičić), Deadpool decides to form his own team – the X-Force.

1. F#@% Wolverine. Deadpool 2 opens with a music box reenacting Wolverine’s death at the end of Logan, and watching the two movies nearly back-to-back was especially entertaining. If this Deadpool is aware that (a) Wolverine has died, it’ll be intriguing to see how he reacts to working with another Logan from another world. And where the first Deadpool film poked gentle fun at Hugh Jackman, Deadpool 2 primes their inevitable team-up with a post-credits gag in the Super Duper Extended Cut. In the theatrical cut, Deadpool shoots the Wade Wilson from X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but the extended cut gives him more dialogue: “Look, eventually, you’re going to hang up the claws, and it’s gonna make a lot of people very sad. But one day, your old pal Wade’s gonna ask you to get back in the saddle again. And when he does, say yes.” Oddly prescient? Or just throwing down the gauntlet? In the way that the first film’s post-credits name-checked Cable, this one feels like Deadpool marking his territory (a pun I’m sure he would appreciate).
2. Just cleaning up the timelines. After swiping and repairing Cable’s time-travel device, Deadpool goes around time-hopping (or, as they call it in the comics, “body-sliding”), saving Vanessa’s life while killing Ryan Reynolds circa 2011. (In the Super Duper cut, he also pays a visit to baby Hitler.) With the TVA playing a role in the trailers, I can’t believe this flagrant continuity manipulation won’t be an issue for them. On the flip side, we reunite with two mutants in the post-Days of Future Past timeline – Yukio (Shioli Kutsana) and the Juggernaut (an uncredited and CGI-assisted Ryan Reynolds). Before this rewatch, I’d entirely forgotten that this is our second franchise Yukio, and in fairness it’s entirely possible this is a different Yukio from The Wolverine’s Rila Fukushima. (This one has an electrified whip, not precognition.) Still, it might be fun to see both Yukios on screen in a few weeks. Meanwhile, this Juggernaut is a fair case of “less is more”; rather than spout dated internet memes, this Juggernaut is a marked improvement, all force and demolition just for the hell of it. 
3. Our group will be forward-thinking. One of Deadpool 2’s best jokes is even funnier given how much the trailers played up the existence of X-Force. Domino, Bedlam, Shatterstar, Zeitgeist, Vanisher – the trailer made it look like these C-listers would be headlining the film, and in a world where Groot made a billion dollars, it wasn’t inconceivable. So to watch nearly all of them die horrible, grisly deaths to the spiraling guitar licks of “Thunderstruck” is still outrageously funny. It’s unlikely Marvel will get around to many (if any) of these characters; though the surviving Domino (Zazie Beetz) hasn’t been announced yet for Deadpool & Wolverine, I’d be amazed if she’s not involved. While the film teases that the whole thing was franchise bait for Josh Brolin’s multi-film contract, I do recall some buzz about a proper X-Force film before Disney bought the store. (Meanwhile, Deadpool cracks a joke that both anticipates and deflates a major beat from next week’s film. Like and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss that post.)
4. Essex House. Another film, another Mister Sinister tease that never materialized. The crux of the film centers around the violent mutant rehabilitation at the Essex House, run by Eddie Marsan’s sadistic and nameless Headmaster. Marsan isn’t playing Sinister, whose real name is Nathaniel Essex, but his gene therapy/torture at a home for wayward mutants is exactly the kind of scheme that might embroil Marvel’s leading eugenicist. This Sinister tease also plants the seeds for a deeper interconnectedness that never came to pass; having already seen Essex goons steal Wolverine’s DNA, and with one more Sinister tease yet to come (but left, as I recall, on the cutting room floor), this film posits the Essex House as a kind of anti-Xavier’s academy, with Domino realizing that she was raised in this selfsame orphanage. (There’s even a pointed cameo from Luke Roessler, who plays the young David Haller on Legion, implying a backdoor connection with the TV series.) Was Mister Sinister poised to be the next big baddie of the X-Men franchise, with a fertile story reason to introduce, oh, perhaps some “new mutants’?
5. Zip it, Thanos! As I watched Josh Brolin play Cable (perfect casting, really, even as the movie hangs a lantern on the difference in stature), I flashed back to all the doubling and recasts we’ve seen in the MCU so far. Gemma Chan, Alfre Woodard, Patton Oswalt, Michelle Yeoh... and that’s not even counting folks like Tara Strong who’ve voiced multiple roles. Is it inconceivable that Brolin – notorious for playing franchise archvillain Thanos – might reprise the part of Cable once the mutants make the jump to Marvel proper? Deadpool’s already made “the” joke, and Thanos being fully CGI probably helps; plus, the older Cable gets, the more the character works in opposition to meeting his parents in his past (spoilers, he’s Nathan Summers, the son of Cyclops and a clone of Jean Grey). You could even have some fun with the fact that he’s a refugee from a dead timeline; his present no longer exists, especially if the Fox timeline is walled off, destroyed, or pruned at the end of Deadpool & Wolverine. At the very least, it’d be a shame not to see him one last time, given that he’s heretofore unaware that Deadpool repaired (and abused) his technology. 

Sound off in the comments, true believers: what’s a Deadpool to do when the TVA turns up at his door? Up next, the phoenix rises one more time for an X-sunset, a metaphor that’s holding together about as well as the rest of Dark Phoenix.

Cinemutants - Logan (2017)

At a time when superhero movies are starting to lose their stranglehold on pop culture, there are really only two options: go back and watch old movies, or kill off an entire cinematic universe in spectacular fashion. This July, Marvel’s taking the latter approach with Deadpool & Wolverine, which seems primed to seal off the 20th Century Fox film universe. And while director Shawn Levy promises, “This movie is built [...] with no obligation to come prepared with prior research,” skipping the research has never really been my strong suit when it comes to franchises. It’s a perfect excuse, then, to go through the last 24 years (and 13 movies) with everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-Men.

This week, from 2017, it’s Logan. In the near future, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) has retired, caring for an aging, ailing Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). But Logan too is plagued with a sluggish healing factor, declining eyesight, and the world-weariness of a man who wants to die but still cannot. Though mutants haven’t been born in years, a young girl (Dafne Keen) arrives in Logan’s life with what appears to be his exact power set. 

1. The man comes around. Logan is such a good movie that I was, I’ll confess, a little disappointed when I heard that Hugh Jackman was returning for Deadpool & Wolverine. Jackman and director James Mangold were explicit about Logan being the grand finale for the character, and as good as The Wolverine was, Logan is leaps better. It barely feels like a superhero movie, and you know I mean that without any sense of self-loathing; it feels like a film about these characters, what makes them tick, and what proves to be their undoing. Jackman embodies all the contradictions of an aging, dying Logan, still possessed of his compassion and his rage in equal parts. The movie Shane gets invoked, which might be too cute by half, but as a trilogy, we’ve seen Logan as superhero, ronin, and now gunslinger. Through it all, Jackman has always found something consistent in the character, some core emotional truth that made him one of the best there is at what he does.
2. Something unspeakable. Logan is Jackman’s show, but it’s very nearly a two-hander with Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier. (We also get Stephen Merchant as a very different Caliban from the one we met in Apocalypse.) Now in his nineties, this Xavier is heartbreaking, tortured by his failing body and the death of his dream for mutantkind. It’s also quite possibly Stewart’s best and most human performance as the erstwhile leader of the X-Men; no longer just a symbol, this Xavier is wholly mortal and deeply fallible, yet there’s still a glimmer of the school’s founder when he reminds Logan, “Someone has come along.” In another emotionally devastating beat, he refutes Logan’s overwhelming cynicism with a reminder, “It is [real] for Laura,” accidentally expressing one of my core beliefs about what empowers comic book readers (which Laura happens to be). It’s unclear whether this is the end of the First Class timeline, an older timeline, or a completely detached epilogue outside of continuity (a la The Dark Knight Returns) – but nor does it really matter; this is one end of the road for these characters.
3. Both hunter and caregiver. Adding a kid sidekick can sometimes be the death knell for superhero stories, heralding the end of original stories or watering down the material for a younger generation. But Dafne Keen’s interpretation of Laura as part feral child, part lost childhood is so compelling that folks are still beating the drum for her to continue in the role of X-23. Possessing none of the pretentiousness or precociousness of many child performers, Keen holds her own opposite Jackman with a fully realized and deeply human presentation. She’s both denied and been cagey about reprising her role in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I think we’d all be tickled to see her don the yellow costume of her ersatz father. (The fact that she’s stayed close to the mouse’s fold, with a dynamite role in The Acolyte on Disney+, bodes well, I think.)
4. I believe you knew my father. Raise your hand if you’d forgotten that Richard E. Grant plays the villain in one of the best X-Men films. I do recall that when his casting was announced, folks logically assumed he’d be playing Mister Sinister, following on from the Apocalypse post-credit scene. While he would have been fantastic as the vamping, besotted mutant geneticist (and is perhaps now sadly too old for the role), there’s something equally powerful in the banality of Grant playing Zander Rice, whose father was one of the nameless scientists who gave Wolverine his adamantium claws back in 1979. It’s a nice touch that ties together a trilogy of Wolverine movies with almost no connecting tissue, and Grant brings a certain snarl and menace to a role that requires him to believe he’s acting in humanity’s best interest. I’d speculate that we might see Grant in a different role, perhaps as a comics-accurate Reverend Stryker, but then I remembered we already have Richard E. Grant in the MCU as the time-lost Old Loki.
5. Holding your own heart. I’m not breaking new ground with this one, and indeed apparently James Mangold has long since confirmed it. But watching Logan so close to The Wolverine alerted me to the truth in Yukio’s vision of Logan’s death: “I see you on your back. There’s blood everywhere. You’re holding your own heart in your hand.” Indeed, this Logan passes away, covered in blood, holding Laura’s hand, finally tasting something of the peace that Xavier had promised could come from having a family. It’s a perfect and fitting end for this character, and we all believed Hugh Jackman when he said it was the end of the road. Even with Patrick Stewart’s Doctor Strange cameo, I didn’t think a Wolverine variant was in the cards because of how well Jackman stuck the landing here, so now I’m more curious than ever to see what lured him out of retirement – and which Wolverine (and from whence) he’s bringing with him.

Sound off in the comments, true believers: should Logan have stayed dead? Or do you think the old bub still has one more in him? Up next, perhaps the most important film in this rewatch series, or maybe just one of the most fun. It’s Deadpool 2.