‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Review: Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman Rely on Smirks and Sentiment in Overstuffed Team-Up

In their third collaboration, director Shawn Levy was never going to be the one to rein in Ryan Reynolds’ taste for quippy zingers and winking meta gags that regularly demolish the fourth wall, especially when the star gets the lead screenplay credit. If you thought Deadpool or Deadpool 2 were heavy on in-jokes, then buckle up, because that shtick is dialed up to radioactive levels in Deadpool & Wolverine. That of course will be welcome news for the franchise’s most ardent admirers, particularly those who look back fondly on Marvel’s Fox era.

Reynolds’ wisecracking mercenary Wade Wilson is at a low point on his timeline, no longer considered relationship material by the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, barely present), and only somewhat buoyed by the affection of his loyal group of friends, a ragtag assortment returning from the first and second films. All he really wants is to matter.

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A similar existential anxiety might run through the head of any movie critic attempting to approach this installment with something more nuanced than gushing hyperbole. Will reviews, either good or bad, matter at all to a release that promises to be a crowd-pleasing box office juggernaut? Not in the least when each MCU cameo and callback and ironically deployed pop song elicits squeals of joy from the audience. Does that mean it’s good? No, but that’s a way more complicated question, and the answer will depend entirely on what you want out of it.

The connection between Reynolds’ Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s brooding steel-clawed mutant started with a hostile face-off in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But since the emergence of a kinder, gentler Deadpool in the wiseass character’s first stand-alone movie, Wade has carried on a long-distance flirtation with Wolverine.

Given Reynolds’ tireless propensity for sassy gay humor, that was bound to get a little moist now that they finally share star billing in a bickering buddy movie, blurring the line between lovers and fighters, even if their blood-drenched fights are plenty vicious. As a preamble to the most violent of them, Wade turns direct to camera and advises: “Get your special sock out, nerds. It’s gonna get good.”

As bountiful as the action scenes are here, the jokes are the sturdiest part of Deadpool & Wolverine (and if it seems like I’m giving too many of them away, don’t worry, there are loads more to go around). That’s because the plot is a lumpy stew of familiar elements, given minimal narrative clarity despite the reams of expository technobabble spouted by Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Paradox. That smarmy supervisor at the Time Variance Authority ropes in Deadpool to fix a wonky timeline, giving him a chance to matter, but at the cost of everyone he loves. Or something like that. If you watched Disney+’s Loki, all this possibly hangs together a little better.

Spoiler etiquette prevents me from going much deeper, but I will say it’s around this time that a sick feeling planted itself in my stomach and a dreaded thought began to form in my brain: “Oh no, the fucking multiverse again!” I did laugh at Wade’s side note that The Wizard of Oz did the multiverse first and it should have stopped there. “The gays knew it and we didn’t listen.” But the jokesmiths, sorry, screenwriters — alongside Reynolds, that includes Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells and Levy — are still not listening, so we get a whole lot of trouble caused by Paradox’s unsanctioned “time ripper.”

An early scene has Wade applying to join the Avengers and getting a firm no from a character who’s the first of too many cameos to count. A challenging few years later, Wade is still licking his wounds and selling used cars. But all that changes when the TVA goon squad brings him in, though not before he can eye their truncheons and say, “Pegging is not new for me. But it is for Disney.” If you’ve been waiting for a character in a Disney release to say, “I’m not naturally a bottom,” your wait is over.

Going rogue while ostensibly following leads given to him by Paradox about the universe in jeopardy, Deadpool tracks down Wolverine, in fact numerous versions of him, all of them pickled in alcohol and self-hatred. Many of us might wish Jackman had retired the character on a high with James Mangold’s gritty neo-Western Logan. But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to see those mutton-chop sideburns again, and Jackman’s glowering gravitas makes an amusing foil for Reynolds’ irrepressible playfulness. “I am Marvel Jesus!” exults Wade when he mistakenly assumes he’s been handed some messianic task. “Suck it, Fox!” Wade makes a joke of everything, but he cares.

That applies as much to the filmmakers as to Deadpool. Even before the snippets of Fox’s Marvel movies and old EPK interviews with Reynolds and Jackman over the end credits — poking the lump in fans’ throats with Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” — it’s obvious there’s a ton of love for the cosmology and its characters. Levy, who directed Reynolds in Free Guy and The Adam Project and Jackman in Real Steel, is never in doubt that fan service is the principal job requirement. That and a foot clamped on the accelerator, although speed doesn’t necessarily equal momentum.

For the core audience, the gags will be reward enough, even if the rest of us might squirm as the sloppily staged action grows repetitive, the plotting haphazard and the humor so self-aware the movie threatens to disappear up its own ass. And is it too much to ask for a blockbuster that looks at least halfway decent?

A colorless entry in the long line of British villains designed to show that good diction is inherently evil, Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova doesn’t bring much spark even if she makes life hell for Deadpool, Wolverine and other exiled MCU figures once Paradox jettisons them into a dumping ground called The Void. Reynolds’ quips make it clear that the resemblance to George Miller’s Mad Max terrain is entirely intentional. There’s a lot of business with Cassandra attempting to gain control of the Time Ripper and play havoc with reality, but as climaxes go, it’s a dry hump.

I’ll be honest, I found this movie messy and overstuffed, but I laughed almost as often as I cringed from its obnoxiousness and can’t dispute that a vast audience will delight in every moment. Even if they spend much of the running time sticking blades through each other’s handily regenerating flesh, Reynolds and Jackman make sweet love and appear to be having a great time doing it. They bring a semblance of heart. Both characters have their share of regrets, but both are offered redemption here; both get to matter.

As Deadpool says of Wolverine with a smirk: “Fox killed him. Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s 90!” Not for the first time we’re reminded that comic-book IP is a place where no one ever truly dies.