Review: Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Deadpool & Wolverine is less a movie and more a collection of fan service, references, and easter eggs. At the same time, it's a shot in the arm for the flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe, which really should have ended (or at least gone into hibernation) following Avengers: Endgame. Listen, everyone knows the score here: Deadpool exists to break the fourth wall and offering meta commentary on the experience of the film as it happens. It's both refreshing and exhausting in equal portions, but the constant inside jokes that call out everything from other Ryan Reynolds movies to the Disney purchase of Fox to deep cuts for comic book aficionados effectively render non-stop dopamine hits for the viewer that keep things moving along and distract us from the shortcomings of the story. Take out all the fun references and what we're left with isn't much: Deadpool's reality is collapsing because Logan sacrificed himself a few years ago (in 2017's LOGAN, natch), and now the only hope for the survival of the characters we've come to know in previous Fox films is for The Merc With The Mouth to scour the multiverse for a Wolverine who can set things right. The big bad of it all is a mutant named Cassandra Nova, a character from Grant Morrison's seminal-if-controversial run on the New X-Men comic book in the early 2000s.

But really, any time the movie stops mugging for the camera and tries to move the story along, it slows to a crawl. It's a reminder that Fox never quite knew what to do with many of these characters, even though a lot of us have nostalgia for that era of Marvel filmmaking that included a whole bunch of X-Men films, Daredevil, Elektra, and the Fantastic Four, among others. This movie is well aware of the fan affection for that era and spends much of its time making jokes about those movies while also reminding us why we liked them in the first place. Cameos ahoy, this is Disney sending the Fox era out with a kiss and a slap.

I would argue that having a good time at a movie and a movie being technically and artistically of merit are two different things. To that point, Deadpool & Wolverine is not a very good movie. It is a fun one, though, at least sometimes. If I may compare the Marvel Cinematic Universe to the mighty Universal Monsters franchise of the 1930s and 1940s, this is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, in which many fan favorite characters return not to thrill us, but to nostalgically comfort us. Satire of a genre is a signal that the genre is in decline; this movie acknowledges the audience's exhaustion. The success of Deadpool and Wolverine has injected some cash into the MCU, but it also signals the inevitable end of the cycle, whenever that may be. In the case of Abbott and Costello, the monsters limped on for another 7 years before the cycle had completely run its course. How much longer will the MCU last? Just as the Fox era has now come to a close, one can't help but wonder how many more of these Marvel superhero adventures the audience will be willing to take before it's time to put the MCU in storage for a while. Until then, Deadpool & Wolverine feels fresh enough to keep things going...for now.