The film itself confirms what the tiresome promotional material had long threatened. Deadpool & Wolverine, the first Marvel Cinematic Universe flick to get an R certificate in the US, is, despite that supposed confirmation of mature content, the most relentlessly juvenile entry in a sequence that has rarely been confused with Ingmar Bergman’s Faith trilogy.
As in the first two Deadpool films (not officially MCU product), Ryan Reynolds’s titular thug cusses and disses like an eight-year-old trying to shock a prim babysitter. This time he has a new joke. From the start, we are made aware that Deadpool will be bravely poking fun at Marvel’s corporate overlords. “Pegging is not new to me, but it is to Disney,” he says with an actual twinkle. (You must look elsewhere for an explanation of the sexual practice here referenced.) There are jokes about Disney’s corporate takeover of Fox. There is even an apparent acknowledgment that this might not be the best time to join the MCU.
It’s as if the studio is enduring one of those awful comedy roasts, once unavoidable on American cable TV, that allowed celebrities the opportunity to prove they were “good sports”. Of course, such extended comic attention, playing on a biography treated as public legend, actually counts as the most transparent form of deflected flattery. (If I were Deadpool I’d make a joke about noses muffled in rear ends. But I’m not. So I won’t.)
[ Deadpool review: Cheap, exploitative, unreconstructed rubbishOpens in new window ]
[ Deadpool 2 review: If you like action and postmodernism, roll upOpens in new window ]
This would be less irritating if the film were properly committed to the bit. Its inability to do so is revealed early on as Deadpool, following a title sequence in which he unearths Wolverine’s rotting corpse, half-worries about dishonouring James Mangold’s Logan. Shawn Levy, directing at the MCU for the first time, knows better than to risk any ungloved digs at that (to be fair, admirable) 2017 lament for the spike-knuckled X-Man. There is a lot more such hypocritical genuflection as, in the later stages, the two characters ponder the beginnings and ends of Wolverine.
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It is hardly worth explaining how the film gets to that point, but some token effort must be made. Following that opening disinterment, we flash back to find Wade Wilson, alter ego to Deadpool, living the ordinary sap’s life as a second-hand-car dealer. Redrafting into the superworld comes with the arrival of slimy Matthew Macfadyen (the best thing in the flick) as a representative of something called the Time Variance Authority. It seems calamity will befall one or other of many parallel timelines if some version of Wolverine is not tracked down.
So Deadpool, excited by visions of a predicted meeting with Thor, sets out to separate tiny Hugh Jackman from thug Hugh Jackman from drunk Hugh Jackman. All to the exhausting strains of too many pop hits from the sacred period of cheese that, if current cinema tells us anything, ran from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Sorry? What? “Come again? But this time in my ears,” as the reliably witless Deadpool actually says.
All the above is just a mechanism for admitting an orgy of guest appearances and snarky parodies. Emma Corrin, whose superpower seems to be Swiss-finishing-school vowels, does decent work as an off-the-peg villain, but more attention will come the way of celebrity cameos at whose identities we’re probably not even allowed to hint (though I will say one subplot looks to have underrated the appeal of a rival franchise).
The creators of Deadpool will argue, lamely in my view, that by admitting the puerile nature of the humour they inure themselves to criticism in that area, but no such excuses are offered for the onanistic self-regard. After two hours of this infantile mugging, one is left longing for the genuinely upending humour of the Batman TV series from 60 years ago. Awful. Just awful.
