Fans of the Deadpool movies knew that a little thing like Logan (AKA Wolverine played by Hugh Jackman) dying at the end of the titular Logan would not be a problem. While other franchises might have just ignored that timeline and operated under a different canon, Deadpool & Wolverine, with its fourth-wall-breaking lead Wade Wilson (AKA Deadpool played by Ryan Reynolds), who previously used the credit sequence of Deadpool 2 to go into X-Men Origins: Wolverine to kill the first incarnation of Wade Wilson that Ryan Reynolds played as well as Ryan Reynolds when he got the script for Green Lantern, it comes as no surprise that it would acknowledge his death, use it, and the thing that’s permeated the MCU films and TV shows of late – the multi-verse. There’s probably a dirty joke about allowing them to have their cake and eat it too, but I’ll leave that to Deadpool.
The film promises that it will be a team-up between Deadpool and Wolverine and on that it delivers. The film keeps that focus centered fairly early on after setting up Deadpool in a rut having been rejected from the Avengers and unsuccessfully selling cars in a bad toupee. However, he still has people he cares about who he will do anything to protect, thus it doesn’t matter that he’s offered what he thought he wanted if it means they all perish (because he wanted it for them, particularly Vanessa played by Morena Baccarin), and that is what drives him to find Wolverine and traversing the multi-verse until he can get one to bring back with him.
The film has a few different sequences of fun and games, and this was the first one as Deadpool tried to find the “right” Wolverine, finding different variants and often fighting him, even one played by a different actor that is meant to be a surprise. While I could spoil it for you, and you could easily look it up, I won’t because if you manage to go in without foreknowledge, you should. While this cameo is meant to be the first surprise, it is not the only one, and the other cameos are mostly not really cameos, they are more supporting characters in the film. And while the team-up may be some tongue-in-cheek version of “Avengers Assemble” there is also an earnestness to it. That even the screw-ups, the cast-offs, the cancelled, and the never-got-a-chance-to-try, when given a chance, can make a difference, can change the day. Because, every Deadpool movie, while having foul language, extreme violence, and before this one, drug use, is still a superhero movie, and that is what is at their heart. That when you work together, you can surmount the insurmountable. Of course, it helps if you are basically indestructible like Deadpool and Wolverine.
There has been a superhero fatigue, which was jokingly teased in Deadpool & Wolverine, and a lot of it I think can stem from people finding low stakes in them, especially with the multi-verses and time-travel, is that no death can ever be seen as truly final – only that iteration, as proven in this very film, audiences do like stakes, when everything can be written/overwritten constantly, you lose desire to invest in the product. Deadpool & Wolverine is an outlier in this recent trend for a couple of reasons, I think. Deadpool has always been open about its meta-nature, inviting you along as it writes canon, and people have been wanting a proper Deadpool and Wolverine team-up since the fight in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, so it has 15 years of anticipation behind it. A cocktail for box office success even if most will probably walk away finding the marriage of Deadpool with Disney less satisfying than that of Deadpool & Wolverine, because while the film still operated high violence and a sharp tongue, it did seem a little declawed along with a little narratively lost. Perhaps it was because it was trying to fit within the MCU, or because there was a larger gap between Deadpool 2 and this film than between the first two, or because the film was affected by shooting partially during the writers’ strike, regardless, there was some roughness (again leaving the jokes to Deadpool) to the film.
There is no 4th film announced so this could be the last time to see Deadpool (though probably not Wolverine, you can’t keep him down even when he dies as proven in this film). Deadpool & Wolverine is in theatres.
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