Review of Deadpool & Wolverine: This time the MCU is the villain

Being a Deadpool defender can be difficult. In pretty much every medium he appears in, the character is exactly what his harshest critics think he is: an antihero with a strong affinity for irreverent violence, and a childish, obnoxious vessel for metaphors and a bunch of dick jokes. (“A bunch of dicks” would be a pretty solid Deadpool-ism.) I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding all of that off-putting, because it is. But there’s more to the character. Deadpool has a deep pathos. When that’s used effectively, it creates endearingly weird stories about those who are deemed (or feel) unlovable. That’s a powerful emotional space for a summer blockbuster. Deadpool and Wolverine — the third film in Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool trilogy and the first under the Disney banner – pays a lot of lip service to this pathos. Then it pushes it out of our multiverse, to Alioth-knows-where.

Look, I made a reference! Just like Deadpool! I can also swear like him.

Deadpool and Wolverine was invoiced as a Marvel Cinematic Universe story, but it’s not actually that. Aside from a brief gag scene early in the film, Deadpool never sets foot on the MCU’s Earth-616 to commit any Deadpool-esque foolhardiness. Instead, the film is simply MCU-aware – the main MCU is another subject for Deadpool to joke about and pine for while he goes off on a characteristically vulgar adventure elsewhere. In some ways, the MCU is more of a villain than the film’s actual villains.

But before that, the story begins in Deadpool’s already existing corner of the multiverse, which is dying. Kidnapped by the Time Variance Authority from Loki

, Wade Wilson/Deadpool (Reynolds) learns that his universe is slowly disappearing due to Wolverine’s death in late 2017. LoganThat’s because the former X-Man is an “anchor being” — someone so significant that their timeline falls apart without his presence. But TVA agent Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) says his superiors thought Deadpool was special and worth rescuing from his decaying timeline and bringing into the MCU. The problem is, the invitation doesn’t extend to the family Wade built (and revived through time travel) in his previous two films.

That is Deadpool and WolverineThe first problem: It already appears on the screens extremely overly complicated and full of narrative baggage. That’s not necessarily a problem if director/co-writer Shawn Levy and his screenwriting team just want to make fun of overly complex superhero movies. But it Is a problem in building that pathos that’s also crucial to Deadpool as a character. I don’t particularly care that I don’t fully understand the mechanics of time and/or multiverse travel in this movie, or the chain of cause and effect that drives the plot. Frankly, I’m not sure the film’s five credited writers – Levy, Reynolds, recurring Deadpool screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and comic and TV writer Zeb Wells – care all that much about those things.

I Do However, caution is advised when this confusion also affects the emotional aspects of the film. Deadpool and Wolverine spends so little time describing Wade’s standing in relation to his friends and relationships (for some reason that’s hard to explain, he’s at odds with his ex-girlfriend Vanessa, played by Morena Baccarin) that his driving need to do something that “matters” seems rootless. It’s static, not much different at the end of the film’s two hours and seven minutes than it was at the beginning.

Perhaps that is because the film places much of its emotional burden on Wade’s co-star. Logan (Hugh Jackman) enters Deadpool and Wolverine as part of Wade’s harebrained plan to save his universe. If Logan is the anchor being of his timeline, Wade’s logic goes, he’ll just search other universes until he finds a new one. The Logan he eventually catches is even more damaged than the one we saw in the X-movies, and much of the film’s non-funny runtime is spent exposing that. This seems like a poor use of Wade’s time and ours. Logan’s whole thing is a lot

of notoriety in previous X-movies, and while his presence here has plenty of funny moments, his contribution to the film’s emotional arc feels very much like stolen franchise bravado à la Spider-Man: No Way Home.

However, it is difficult to take all this seriously, because Deadpool and Wolverine is much more interested in focusing on Deadpool’s relationship to the MCU. From the first second of the film, Disney, Marvel, and Kevin Feige are established as thematic targets of the film’s comedy. No character work is needed to anchor any of the jokes here, because the MCU is that anchor. All that swearing and violence? It’s in a Disney Movie, baby! Remember when Wade got nailed in the first Deadpool movie? Mickey Mouse paid for a movie about a guy getting nailed! Oh, and the villains in the movie? All a result of Marvel’s corporate dominance.

This last piece is where Deadpool and Wolverine almost gets to something interesting. The majority of the film takes place in The Void, a Mad Max-style limbo where the TVA sends troublesome people they can’t really wipe out. Ruled by the powerful telepath (and evil twin sister of X-Men leader Charles Xavier) Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), The Void is an island of misfit toys filled with heroes and villains from other movie studios that were discarded by the MCU powers that be after Disney bought out 20th Century Fox. If you’re thinking of Deadpool and Wolverine

The many cameos and guest appearances of … have their origin in this: corporate consolidations used as fodder for jokes.

While Logan and Wade are trying to defeat Cassandra and escape the Void, the two are also trying to escape the ruins of 20th Century Fox’s X-Men universe. Unfortunately, this storyline and the gags surrounding it only undermine Deadpool and the very narrow lane of pathos that defines him. Because as much as he constantly makes fun of the MCU, he can’t stop defining himself in terms of it, calling himself “Marvel Jesus” throughout the film. Regardless of the fate of his home universe, Wade wants to be important – which is a way of saying that he wants to join the main MCU universe and that this is the only one in this continuum that does Object.

That’s more or less the game. It’s hard to accept this film as a love letter to anything other than Marvel Studios’ corporate conquests. That’s one of the fundamental miscalculations behind the film. Wade is worth rooting for because he’s an underdog. But in Deadpool and Wolverinehe doesn’t represent the unloved or speak truth to power: he sucks up the ass of the undisputed champion of the box office, even though that champion deserves the jabs that Deadpool throws at him. The Void is what Marvel has done to pop culture. It’s the reputation that comes out of the house, the big damn smoke dragon that assimilates everything into its morass of multiversal nonsense or banishes it to oblivion, dismantles it into pieces. And in this film, Deadpool doesn’t just Love he wants to be a part of it with his whole being.

Deadpool and Wolverine has made its hero the worst kind of comic book character: one who stands for nothing. It’s a terrible irony. Fans feared that Disney’s corporate control and the MCU’s rigid narrative oversight Dead Pool‘s edge, the foul language, the joking violence. Turns out that part was fine. Instead, the MCU just took away its damn heart.

I told you I can swear like that cheeky bastard.

Deadpool and Wolverine will be in theaters on July 25th.