Deadpool & Wolverine disappears down its own Fox[Glory]hole

First things first: Deadpool & Wolverine is fun. A lot of fun. So much fun. Really, just a whole load of fun. But… actually, hold on. Before we get to that, let’s rewind little.

Using Cable’s time machine, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) makes his way to the Sacred Timeline of the MCU to try out, unsuccessfully, for The Avengers. Crushed by the rejection, he returns home and gives up being Deadpool, causing his relationship with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) to break down. Six years later, during his birthday party, Wade is forcibly summoned by Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) of the TVA who offers him a second chance to rejoin the Sacred Timeline. It turns out that, due to the events of Logan, Wade’s timeline (10005, for all you number crunchers out there) is collapsing and will completely erode in a couple of thousand years due to the loss of its anchor being. When he realises Paradox means to accelerate the destruction of his timeline, Deadpool refuses to let his friends perish. Stealing Paradox’s TemPad, he embarks on a madcap montage across the multiverse looking for a replacement Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, most of the time) to stabilise his timeline. But when he returns to the TVA with a suitable – well, the only available – candidate, Paradox summarily banishes them both to the Void.

If you think that’s an awful lot of expository set-up for a two-hour cavalcade of creative profanity, scatological humour and no-holes barred innuendo, you’re not wrong. Deadpool & Wolverine front loads its comic book MacGuffinery to get it over and done with and make sure it doesn’t get in the way of Ryan Reynolds having the time of his fucking life. In many ways, Deadpool & Wolverine has a lot in common with Thor: Love & Thunder. Both films feature members of their cast giving their best performances to date and both suffer from their driving creative forces overindulging because there’s nobody willing to stand up to them (see also George Lucas and his yes-man producer Rick McCallum). There are more than a few moments in Wolverine & Deadpool where Ryan Reynolds was so preoccupied with whether or not he could, he didn’t stop to think if he should.

The character of Deadpool has built his cinematic success on his tendency to break the fourth wall at just the right moments to maximise comic effect, but it’s hard to break the fourth wall if it never really goes up in the first place. In this third outing, Reynolds doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as pulverise it into dust and snort it to fuel his constant stream of consciousness nonsense. While I haven’t done the precise maths, I’m pretty sure this may be the first movie ever where the audience is addressed directly more often than any of the characters in the movie and certainly more than the supporting ensemble who brought so much fun to Deadpool and Deadpool 2, all of whom are pretty much sidelined into token cameos here, including – bizarrely – an inexplicably resurrected Shatterstar (Lewis Tan), while Domino and a presumably too expensive Josh Brolin’s Cable are notable absentees around the table.

You can have too much of a good thing, and this movie is basically too much of a good thing pretty much all of the time. While the humour is as sharp, relentless and creatively loquacious as ever, with Deadpool’s signature rapid-fire jokes and meta-references flying faster and more furious than ever before, the film never pauses to let a gag settle before catapulting to the next, a breathless barrage that’s equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. It’s very much a double-edged adamantium sword – while some jokes hit their mark with pinpoint precision, others – just as good – get lost in the frenetic whirlwind, diluted by the constant shift in tone and pace. It’s a comedy roast of the MCU delivered with the self-control and pacing of Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil.

Cinematographically, Deadpool & Wolverine isn’t much to look at, but then a trip to the Void was never going to be the most visually stunning of vistas, given much of the action takes place, vintage Doctor Who style, in a disused quarry. No, the visual appeal lies in spotting the almost unfeasibly numerous easter eggs hiding in plain sight, strewn across the landscape and hidden in every nook and cranny. Seriously, there haven’t been this many Easter eggs on screen in a single film since Hop. The references range from in-universe nods to past and parallel events from other movies to metatextual nods, like the half-buried Twentieth Century Fox. And therein lies the secret at the heart of this dick-joke jamboree. For all the hype of Deadpool’s long-awaited arrival in the MCU, that’s not what Deadpool & Wolverine is really about. He only spends about five minutes in the MCU itself and the movie doesn’t end with him there either. Instead, Deadpool & Wolverine is a celebratory “In Memoriam” for the Marvel Fox and Fox-adjacent movies too. Cameos come thick and fast, not all of them getting the time and space they deserve while others get a little too much time, especially those played by Ryan Gosling himself. There are even appearances by characters whose movies never managed to escape development hell, characters who have known nothing else but the void.

One of these is the primary antagonist, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), exiled twin sister of Charles Xavier and a powerfully capricious and unpredictable villain. Corrin provides a perfect foil for Reynolds, an equal but opposite force of irreverent arrogance, a dark reflection of Wade’s broken psyche with a power set that puts her off the charts, threat-wise. But of course, the heart of the film lies in the electric chemistry between Reynolds and Jackman, something that’s been nurtured across the years and social media, incubated with precision and care to ignite at precisely the right time, in this movie. Their dynamic oscillates between begrudging camaraderie and outright hostility, their interactions peppered with biting wit and brutal physical comedy, playing off the “will they fight or fuck?” homoerotic tension so artfully curated by Reynold’s foul-mouthed wordplay.

The foundation of everything, though, is Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine. Having bid goodbye to the character in 2017’s Logan, you’d forgive Jackman for putting on the tights and picking up an easy paycheque but instead he surprises and delights by delivering probably his finest ever performance as the celebrated X-man. Granted, this film gives him far more range to play with than any of his others, allowing him to dive deep into Wolverine’s character, measure himself against his other selves and really explore areas of the character that the ensemble X-Men films or the monomaniacally melancholy Logan didn’t have time for or interest in. He’s possibly the only character who has a well-crafted character arc in the whole movie and Jackman makes the most of it. There’s a moment, very early on, where Deadpool puts a gun to Logan’s head and, as he begs Deadpool to pull the trigger, there’s a look in Jackman’s eyes that evokes the steely complexity and manic vulnerability of Robert Shaw’s Quint from Jaws. It’s a brief but breathtakingly magical moment that puts to rest any doubts that Jackman has more to give this character should he want to continue on. Equal parts triumph and folly, Deadpool & Wolverine is a wild, messy, and thoroughly entertaining ride that capitalises on the chaotic excess of its title character and honours and expands Logan’s cinematic legacy. Does it “save the MCU”? Well, not that I want to enrage the disciples of the self-declared “Marvel Jesus” but no, it does not save the MCU. Mainly because the MCU doesn’t need saving in any way, shape or form, despite what an extremely vocal, extremely online, faction of the fanboy community might say. Cowardice never saved anything or anyone and while there’s undeniably fun in seeing some Fox (and one New Line) veterans get one more turn in the spotlight (how Reynolds resisted giving himself a Hannibal King cameo, I’ll never know), Deadpool & Wolverine has the same issue that, for me, dogged the similarly self-referential (and self-reverential) Spider-Man: No Way Home: it’s looking backwards, not forwards. You can’t find your pathway forward looking in the rear-view mirror and that’s pretty much all this film does.