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.