Back in middle school, our tiny, musty library had a book sale once a year. They were school sponsored, I think, but among all the YA books and Guinness Book of World Records were, oddly, copies of 1001 Dirty Jokes or some such variant. I’d always pick one up. It felt like I was getting away with something. My 8th grade friends and I would then excitedly leaf through the book, usually during class time, trying to find a joke to out dirty the last dirty joke we’d read out loud. This was fun for a little while, but it didn’t take long before we’d tire of the salacious material and move on. I mean, who wouldn’t quickly burn out on an interminable parade of foul language describing various body parts, what comes out of them, and what people may or may not do with them?
Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy, apparently. They can’t seem to get enough. The star and director, respectively, of Deadpool & Wolverine, the third entry in the highly lucrative comic book franchise, present us with an endless barrage of filthy jokes and gory violence, and it wears out its welcome almost immediately. In this case, before the end of the opening credits, an interminable action scene where the titular heroes take down an army of goons although one of them (spoiler alert) is a desiccated corpse.
This is the first appearance by Ryan Reynolds’ fourth wall breaking, “merc with a mouth” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His presence was, of course, facilitated by the Walt Disney Company (which owns Marvel Studios) subsuming 20th Century Fox Studios, the original home of the Deadpool films. And while the earlier two entries in the franchise were definitely “R” rated endeavors, they didn’t come off as desperate in their need to shock as this third entry does. The filmmakers are clearly overcompensating in their need to prove they won’t capitulate to their new, kid friendly Disney overlords.
The crass jokes and over-the-top violence lose their shock value quickly.
And look, the child who nervously bought that 1001 Dirty Jokes book is still alive and well inside me, so a well placed “fuck,” or a jolt of well-timed violence is still effective, even exhilarating, but when presented as repetitively as they are here, it all just becomes numbing. Novocain for the brain.
To fill out the runtime between all the sarcasm and carnage, Deadpool & Wolverine awkwardly inserts mawkish “emotional” moments that don’t feel remotely earned. Hugh Jackman returns to his most famous role as the Wolverine, the adamantium clawed, fan favorite superhero, but he’s saddled with endless scenes of drunken sadness and remorse for something he either did or didn’t do in his past. It takes entirely too long to reveal what happened and is painfully underwhelming once divulged. And having Deadpool make a pithy joke about how long it took to reveal this backstory doesn’t remotely negate the crummy writing (credited to five people, including Ryan Reynolds himself), it just highlights it.
Admittedly, I missed the details of this Wolverine’s backstory because of how it was delivered, a teary-eyed monologue of self-contempt, slurred out between dramatic chugs of alcohol. These scenes are direct callbacks to Mr. Jackman’s “final” turn as the character in the overwrought Logan. In my review for that film, I proposed a drinking game where you take a shot every time Wolverine said some variation of “I’m not the person you think I am…”. Well, prepare your livers because we get the exact same dialogue repeated here once again, so please forgive me for checking out in the middle of it.
The rest of the movie is devoted to the film’s only real raison d’être, cameos. Admittedly, most of them are fun, especially an early one (around the 40-minute mark) that manages to surprise twice and even had curmudgeonly me laughing with appreciation. As much as I loathed Deadpool & Wolverine, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling them for you. It’s pretty much the only real fun the movie has to offer.
But the Deadpool & Wolverine cameos are hollow and inconsequential.
They have no lasting impact on the story or the cinematic universe. They exist solely to rile up an already devoted audience. Indeed, the press screening I attended had a room full of critics clapping like trained seals. But the movie is simply sifting through the detritus of comic book culture (in this movie’s case, literally), dusting off old, semi-forgotten properties and characters and cramming them down the ever-expanding maw of an all too eager audience willing to lap up every last dusty crumb of nostalgia.
It’s all bread and circuses. Superficial appeasement. And despite all of its edgy posturing with jokes at the expense of the studios that made it, Deadpool & Wolverine feels like nothing more than a two-hour explanation of what happens to the assets of one studio when it’s assimilated by another. It’s corporate propaganda masquerading as avant-garde.
