Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are good company and the film knows it, so it gives them a grey wasteland and two hours of jokes about the studio that owns them. Funny in patches, tiring in stretches, and Jackman deserved better.
Ryan Reynolds has waited six years since Deadpool 2 to bring his character under new ownership, and the film he and Shawn Levy have made is about little else. Deadpool & Wolverine wants to be a buddy picture, a wake for the X-Men films Fox made before Disney bought the studio, and a two-hour gag about that takeover. It manages the first in patches and the second in a single scene. The third goes on long after we had stopped laughing.
The opening sets out the terms. Wade digs up a grave and uses what he finds in it to kill a squad of agents in slow motion to NSYNC’s ‘Bye Bye Bye’, dancing between the kills. We laughed, loudly and without shame, because Shane Reid and Dean Zimmerman cut every hit to a beat and Reynolds sells each step as if he had rehearsed it for years. It is also the film’s one trick, and it comes back again and again, with a little less blood in it each time.
Reynolds gives the performance he has given twice before, fast and needy, and it works in bursts. Jackman is the reason to go. He plays this Logan as a man who let people down and has been drinking about it, and wears the yellow and blue suit from Mayes C. Rubeo and Graham Churchyard like a man who lost a bet. There is a scene in a parked car, with no music and no jokes for close to a minute, where he explains what he failed to do. It moved us more than we expected from a film this pleased with itself, because Levy simply left the camera on Jackman’s face and let him finish.
The Void is where the middle hour happens, and it is where the film goes flat. Ray Chan designs it as a scrapyard under a white sky: wrecked cars, a studio logo half buried in sand, a fortress built inside a giant skull. George Richmond lights it in one overcast grey, so nothing casts a shadow and the two suits are the only colour in the frame. It also means much of the film looks like a car park. Levy stages the crowd fights as two lines of extras running at each other, and Rob Simonsen’s score is mostly a rumble under whichever song has been licensed for the slow motion.
Emma Corrin is the other reason. Her Cassandra Nova has a shaved head, a whisper, and a habit of putting her fingers inside people’s skulls, and Corrin plays her as someone faintly bored by her own power. Matthew Macfadyen does Mr Paradox as a middle manager who has promised his superiors something he cannot deliver, and is funny throughout. Dafne Keen, back as Laura, gets the one supporting part with anything in it. Wesley Snipes, Jennifer Garner and Channing Tatum turn up from the Fox years to be recognised and given a line each about the films they never got.
The jokes are what most people will remember, and they are also what wore us down. Every fourth line is about the film itself: the certificate, the budget, the merger, Jackman’s age, the fact of its own existence. Some land. But a joke about corporate cynicism told for two hours by a corporation is still two hours of corporate cynicism, and having Reynolds point out the plot’s contrivances is not the same as fixing them.
Deadpool (2016) had a girlfriend, a grudge and a man to find, and the jokes hung off that. This one has an agency, a device and a wasteland, and the jokes hang off each other. Logan (2017), the film this most wants to salute, made its case with a car, a road and two people who said little. Levy, who directed Reynolds in Free Guy (2021), handles the jokes well and the fights without much interest, and the film needed both.
Go if you saw the Fox films and will feel something when the logo appears in the sand. Take a friend who can explain who Blade is. If not, it will be calmer at home, where the songs can be turned down. It runs 128 minutes and carries a 15 certificate.
