The most telling scene of Deadpool & Wolverine is one where Ryan Reynold’s irony-poisoned anti-hero, excited to be welcomed into the MCU, grabs the camera, curses off Fox while smashing it, and quipping about going to Disneyland. Watching it, I couldn’t help thinking about the undercurrent to these lines being how many Fox employees lost their jobs in that acquisition partly just to get Deadpool (as he himself states) into the MCU. It’s where the veneer drops out of the movie’s attempt at a bittersweet theme. In this movie, Deadpool is fighting for the survival of his universe, and in so doing teaming up with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, as well as other figures likewise representing universes that have been tossed aside in the greater hegemony of the MCU. The implicit notion is that those superhero entities, particularly based on Marvel comics, that existed separate from the MCU matter. That there was value to them that doesn’t deserve to be erased. And yet at the same time it openly gloats about getting to be part of the cool kids club.
This contradiction that is part of what sinks Deadpool & Wolverine is evident from the very start, which opens just about exactly as I predicted it would on Deadpool grave-robbing and then desecrating the corpse of Logan, both the actual character and in a very unsubtle way the movie Logan as well. It was the complaint raised by me and many others when this film was first announced -in bringing Jackman’s character back after such perfect closure in a movie that is probably one of the top five superhero films ever made, it would diminish that moment and the integrity of its ending. Reynolds and Marvel could stress all they want that they weren’t going to be using the same character per se in this era of infinite multiverses, but details of canon aren’t the problem, it’s that the idea is fundamentally soulless. And this movie’s gestures towards Logan, even where it tries to be complimentary, don’t in any way dispute that notion.
Deadpool christens himself 'Marvel Jesus' early on in this movie when he is pulled from his universe by the TVA (an institution introduced in the Disney+ series Loki), and for all of his elaborately profane snark and bloody violence, it isn't an inaccurate designation -in the lens of Jesus as representative symbol. Deadpool as presented here, fits Marvel like a glove. He is their ideal corporate stooge at a time when they need one -shilling the brand while making it look palatable through self-awareness and occasional self-critique. Though despite the talk from Reynolds and executives that Deadpool & Wolverine would take shots at the MCU, it only ever mildly does so. There’s an offhand reference to Deadpool and Wolverine entering the universe “at a low point”, and one sequence that just stops in its tracks so Deadpool can deliver a brief but insubstantial lecture about the failure of their multiverse devices; but otherwise there’s nothing that treads on any toes, nothing that actually challenges the brand or offends its makers.
Indeed, far from conceiving a Marvel future for Deadpool the movie spends most of its time playfully sending up other Marvels past, every referential joke underscored by the gleefulness Disney can't hide in their merger. Learning that his own universe is going to be erased by a bureaucratic TVA agent played by Matthew Macfadyen, because it lost its 'anchor being' in the death of Wolverine, Deadpool pulls another Wolverine out of the multiverse, only for them both to be condemned to the realm of the Void for discarded multiverse ephemera -the first thing we see of it is the 20th Century Fox logo.
It’s in this world sending up Mad Max as much as anything Marvel (probably a tactical move from the studio thinking Furiosa would be a bigger hit) that most of the movie is set and where the bulk of its expected mediocre fan service occurs. And indeed if you’re a follower of superhero cinema there are several familiar faces among the minions of the Void’s dictatorial villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) -the evil twin sister of Charles Xavier. I will grant though that the first cameo is genuinely really funny, one of the rare cases of this movie actually using its shallowness as subversion -and the actor does a great job too. But otherwise most of the fan service is hollow -the effect of the characters we see is mostly in just the novelty of seeing them here (and in one case, seeing them for the first time). There is that meta-textual point I alluded to of the non-MCU Marvel properties having worth, which is a modestly endearing idea if in practice it translated in any way significant. The only character it does do this for is the one whose presence in this movie was its worst kept secret.
And they intersect sharply with the most prominent exemplar of this theme -the guy whose been associated with Marvel for nearly a quarter century now. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine really is the ultimate symbol of the non-MCU Marvel movie enterprise -arguably the man whose most carried the brand through a bunch of failed experiments. And Jackman does play the character with an attempted sense of pathos for that, as well as for his own character and his trauma. He’s the person in the film giving the most effort, but at the same time he’s being made to dance to the fan service tune. He’s got the yellow suit, he strikes the poses. But at least he makes more of the drama allotted him than Reynolds, who since 2016 has been incapable of sincerity, with such a weak dramatic throughline for his own character, of course involving reconciling some unknown division with his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin).
Wade Wilson’s whole social circle and thus Deadpool’s driving motivation, are so fundamentally unimportant. With the exception of Rob Delaney’s comic relief Peter, there is barely more than one scene of the Deadpool supporting cast from the other movies -Baccarin included- and no reason at all for the audience to care about them or their universe. Reynolds even makes the joke that a couple of them aren’t speaking parts -the frequent play of the Deadpool movies to invoke lampshading as a shield against criticism (this happens several times in the movie related to bland exposition). Joke or not, there is no effort to engage the audience at all with Wade's life beyond its implied importance to him -and you can't trust that anything is important to Deadpool. Certainly that appears to be the attitude of the movie as well, where the fourth-wall breaking conceit gives license for nothing to matter. And that is especially the case for a movie that exists as pure brand consolidation, toothless in its motions towards poignancy, driven entirely by a succession of gimmicks.
Reynolds tapped Free Guy and Stranger Things director Shawn Levy for this film, a man with no vision but the baseline competence most appealing to studio executives. There's no consideration for the look of the film barring a couple scenes designed to loosely resemble comic book splash pages and in a couple scenes the editing is rather bafflingly eclectic. The move to the MCU has flattened out what texture the Deadpool movies had, and the action scenes, save for the abundance of crotch shots, are dry -in spite of all the blood. They are just a mess of unimaginative choreography and empty effects, the violence doing little to colour them.
Most of Deadpool's jokes, from as early as the Marvel Studios logo, are transparent and predictable -and only sporadically funny. A part of it is that the character thrived on a novelty that has now been handily exhausted -by fans and Reynolds himself. The same cavalcade of pop references and laboured sexual jokes to deter any real engagement. Quite often the more effective humour comes from other characters -two of the cameos most notably, one of whom makes for a great end credits stinger.
Those credits feature a half-hearted tribute to Fox Marvel -and the X-Men series especially- the capper of this film's intended eulogy. For what it's worth I think the creatives on Deadpool & Wolverine -Reynolds and Levy and their committee of writers, as well as the returning cast- do have some affection for those late relative underdogs of superhero cinema. But the institution through which they're making these gestures is obviously ambivalent, positioning themselves as the ultimate validation. When Disney absorbed Fox one of the loudest concerns that mattered the least was if they would try to censor Deadpool, and enough people will be satisfied that they did not. But Deadpool has become a Disney marketing tool regardless, and even a long-awaited team-up with Wolverine can't obscure that. This movie is not a compromise, it is a sell-out.
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