directed by Shawn Levy
written by Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells and Shawn Levy
After feeling bad about Marvel Studios' recent stumbles, I was happy to learn that the once seemingly-unstoppable box-office behemoth would only be releasing one movie in all of 2024: Deadpool and Wolverine. It wasn't exactly a movie I had been pining for my whole life long to see, but having enjoyed both of Deadpool's first couple of cinematic outings I was looking forward to this with cautious optimism. I need not have worried, as it turned out.
Basically, after retiring from costumed heroics to sell cars, Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) isn't exactly living his best life. While celebrating his birthday with his friends, he finds himself abducted by the Time Variance Authority and brought before one of its chief officers known only as Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen), who tells Wade that his timeline is about to die, having been deprived of its "anchor being," essentially an entity necessary for any given universe's continued existence. In this case, the anchor being of Deadpool's universe is the deceased Logan aka Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who died at the end of Logan. Deadpool is being offered the chance to join the "sacred timeline" or the "main" Marvel Cinematic Universe, but is also informed that everyone in his world will die, including his friends and loved ones like Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), Pete (Rob Delaney), Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), and Colossus (Stefan Kapicic), among others. Distraught, Deadpool escapes the TVA, and exhumes Logan, believing his healing factor has saved him, only to be disappointed. Undeterred, however, Deadpool jumps across universes, attempting to recruit one Wolverine variant after another only to be repeatedly rebuffed until he finds one and brings him back to the TVA. Unfortunately, Paradox tells Wade that this is the worst Wolverine ever, and then banishes them both to the Void. Wade is now in a race against time to get back to his timeline and save it from certain destruction, which could prove to be a bit of a challenge, considering that the Void is run by a particularly nasty character named Cassanda Nova (Emma Corrin) who happens to be Charles Xavier's twin sister from another reality, who, like Deadpool and many others, was sent here.
There are a couple of assumptions I had about this movie that I was happy to see disproven, but I won't go into them so as to avoid spoiling crucial plot details, but I will say this much, I was surprised by how much heart a movie this irreverent managed to have, especially in reference to the now officially-defunct "Fox Marvel Universe." This movie, as unlikely as this may sound, is actually a bit of a love letter to those old movies, without the earliest of which the MCU would not exist.
Even though this is the first Deadpool movie to be released under the Marvel Studios banner, it's still made very much in the mold of the first two films, with all of the key ingredients like graphic violence, plenty of sexual references and enough f-bombs to make Quentin Tarantino blush. It's Marvel Studios' first-ever "R" movie, and it earns the rating and then some in its first five minutes alone. There's plenty to enjoy for those of us who aren't just in it for the potty mouths and the gore; the action sequences are quite-well staged, and the humor, for the most part, works pretty well, especially with all of the "meta" references to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, among other things.
Unfortunately, the writing underpinning all of this is arguably the weakest of any of the Deadpool movies; the plot kind of feels like the kind of story that wouldn't even stand up to casual scrutiny, and even some of the expository dialogue, tongue-in-cheek as it may be, feels a bit off.
Fortunately, this is mostly offset by the fantastic chemistry between Reynolds and Jackman, in their first onscreen team-up since they appeared together in the disastrous 2009 film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. At its heart, this movie is a buddy comedy, and these two guys really sell the heck out of it. For all its shortcomings, this film is definitely something worth catching in movie theaters.
8.5/10
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