Deadpool & Wolverine
Maximum effort
Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
3.5 stars/5
I went and saw this twice. The first time was with my wife, who was totally unfamiliar with Deadpool as a character or a franchise. She was appalled, and reasonably so. This character presented in this way is the diametric opposite of how the MCU has sold itself from the start: big time heroics delivered by heroes with traits worth emulating. Deadpool is … not that. A couple of days later I went and saw it with a shut-in buddy of mine who was depressed and needed to get out of the house. He’s a comics nerd and well-versed in the character and the material. He pronounced it the greatest movie ever, and laughed uproariously the whole time.
Deadpool is not for somebody who’s going in cold to the character and the concept (more on this in a sec). You need to have a sense of what you’re about to see and know if it’s for you or not. You’ll either like Deadpool as a concept or you won’t, and you should have a sense of that before you show up. Watching the first one will help, because these movies escalate. The first one presented Deadpool as a fourth-wall-breaking self-aware character, but it used that as a narrative framing device. This time, Deadpool steps almost fully free of the frame, talking directly to the camera at length, indeed grabbing the camera to redirect it in a couple of places. He makes it plain he knows he’s in a movie, who’s making it, and why. Ryan Reynolds delivers his skewering, bantering narration in the wildly vulgar (and screamingly funny) way he does. But it’s a lot.
Deadpool & Wolverine is for somebody going in cold who is a comic book movie nerd. Someone versed in Marvel movies and the offbeat mayhem Deadpool offers will have huge fun being surprised by this movie. It is chock full of fanservice easter eggs, mostly from outside the established MCU, going back to 2000’s first X-Men and even further back than that. I won’t spoil that, but I mean further back than 2000. Seriously. All the way back. If you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll laugh uproariously and declare this movie awesome. Maybe even a couple of times. But if you’re not into that sort of thing, you don’t need this in your life, and that’s okay, too.
3.5 stars of 5: I liked it, and it’s worth watching twice, but probably no more than than.