It is probably the most anticipated movie in a long while (not necessarily by me) and it was a lot of fun, but I find myself wondering how far Deadpool & Wolverine will really go to reverse Disney/Marvel’s fortunes. In fact, that backstory surrounding recent MCU flops like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Secret Invasion, and She-Hulk is fodder for such a large portion of this film’s jokes (and there are so many jokes that it’s really more comedy than action) that I’m amazed that this film got past all the expensive script doctors. I guess Disney has more of a sense of humour than I expected. However, below the hype and the satire, I’m not so sure it’s so much of a great movie that it brings Marvel’s MCU back to its former glory. Marvel continues to play into the “multiverse” angle that has plagued its movies for most of its “Phase 4” and “Phase 5” productions. In fact, most of the film takes place in the Void, a desolate world/universe featured in the TV series Loki, as a place where the Time Variance Authority (TVA) sent all the character variants that it considered unacceptable and dangerous to “the sacred timeline”. How that apparently translates is that characters licensed from Marvel for past 20th Century Fox movies have now ended up in this Void. The most obvious characters of that category are the titular Deadpool and Wolverine themselves, but there are also others from past X-Men movies making cameos. That brings us to the other huge element of this movie’s success: fan service. Whether fans actually loved the characters or not, bringing back characters from past super-hero movies has worked before (In Spider-Man: No Way Home, we cheered as three Peter Parkers together fought villains from different past films) and seems to work again. I’m not going to spoil anything by revealing the cameo characters, but there are some deep cuts into the MCU production backstory and fandom. So between the humour and the fan service, did this movie actually have the right stuff to be successful? Definitely. However, I don’t know that it would have been a success without them, though.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Deadpool. There’s something off-putting for me watching a character that takes nothing seriously at all. Don’t get me wrong. The jokes are funny, and even hilarious. I love how the character can break the fourth wall, and Ryan Reynolds’s comedic timing is perfect. However, it can get a bit obnoxious and tiresome. For that reason, I think that Wolverine was the perfect companion character. Not only is he one of the gruffest and least jokey characters in the Marvel universe, they chose to have this version be a guilt-ridden, brooding extreme of the character. Hugh Jackman did an excellent job playing this character for the umpteenth time, and I think I enjoyed him more this movie than I have in the past. His action scenes were totally on-point, not to mention extremely impressive that he’s been able to get/keep himself in such great shape. The villain of the piece is Cassandra Nova: a new character to the films but a big name in the comics. She’s a lost twin that X-Men’s leader Charles Xavier killed when they shared a womb — due to anticipation of her intense malevolence–but somehow survived. She is played by Emma Corin, who also played Princess Diana in The Crown. While I did not enjoy her performance so much on The Crown, I thought she was great as Cassandra Nova. She deftly handled her villanous monologues, and maintained a wonderful tea-drinking cruelty as well. It was weird to me that they made her the villain of this “Mad Max” style world and universe and eventually she gets mixed up with the TVA as well. It really seemed like they could have gotten any generic villain who has the power to stop Wolverine and Deadpool. There was virtually no connection to her backstory or her usual super-hero nemesis (spoiler-ish reveal that Professor X does not appear). Nevertheless, like Jackman, Corrin went up in my estimation as she played this role.

Typically, everyone cynical looks at a Disney film and asks where they put the money. Many criticize the special effects or the action set pieces for not looking like they are worth the dollars. This movie’s wasteland setting probably reduced the spend a bit as the characters didn’t really go anywhere, and where they did go was a dusty desert rather than a complicated city full of people and vehicles, etc. Also, most of the characters were hand-to-hand fighters, so there was not much need to make characters fly, shoot lightning, or even swing from webs. Nevertheless, they likely did spend some money on the fight scenes, which were very good — possibly the best of any Deadpool movie. The two main partners are hardly chums and they get into a couple of scenes just fighting each other. Not only was the choreography and camera-work excellent and thrilling in those scenes, they also managed to be brutal and bloody (which can happen when two characters with self-healing fight to the “death”). I think I enjoyed the action sequences (which were mostly just fights) more than the jokes or the fan service. However, the secret sauce is when they blend all three together. The battle where Deadpool is slicing and dicing to the NSYNC hit “Bye Bye Bye”, complete with spot-on dance moves, lives in my brain rent-free.

The weakest element of the movie was the story. On top of being somewhat basic, there were also a number of logic gaps over which we suspend our disbelief. Many of the jokes smoothed over some gaps as well because you don’t really care if things make sense while you’re laughing. For the most part it feels like this story is just a way to resolve the Fox movies and also the pay off the Marvel multiverse. I kind of wish they had put more effort into crafting a more sophisticated and complex story that involved a little sci-fi and super-hero fantasy. I also wish that somewhere along the way they could have taken things a bit more seriously. Let’s face it, this story has virtually no legitimate place in the main MCU (which is not the best way to ease characters from one cinematic universe to another). It feels clearly like satire. In the end, this movie is a lot of fun to watch, and humourously rewarding for anyone who is a serious fan of these characters. However, if this is meant to pump new life into the MCU, it doesn’t really do that. It feels disconnected, despite having the TVA (who have become an MCU fixture) play a very big part in the movie. In the movie, Deadpool winkingly claims he’s “Marvel Jesus”, but as wonderful as this movie was, I don’t think it quite has the power to cause a studio resurrection. 4 out of 5