I’ve seen this twice already and I’d happily go again, which is not something I’ve said about a Marvel film in a while. Deadpool & Wolverine is a lot of fun, and more than that, it’s clearly made by people who actually love this stuff.
I’m a huge fan of both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, and I don’t think anybody could have done this story more justice. The chemistry between them is undeniable. All the snide back-and-forth in the ads and the TV spots turned out to be a preview of the real thing rather than a marketing gimmick covering for a thin film.
The writers are actual super fans
That’s the thing that struck me hardest. You can tell the people writing this understand Deadpool as a character rather than as a permission slip for swearing. They understand the MCU. And crucially, they’ve got a deep working knowledge of the Fox universe, which is a much less fashionable thing to care about.
That knowledge shows up in the details. Characters most of us had mentally filed away as gone get brought back and given a genuine send-off rather than a punchline. There’s a difference between a cameo that says “remember this?” and one that says “this mattered, and here’s the ending it never got.” This film mostly does the second thing.
The Johnny Storm switch got me
My favourite moment on first watch was a genuine misdirect. I was convinced we were getting Steve Rogers, and it turned out to be Johnny Storm instead. Big switch, and a properly clever one.
What makes it work is the language. Chris Evans as Cap spent the Avengers films being the man who says “language,” the walking reprimand about watching your mouth. Putting that same actor on screen and having him swear like a docker is a joke that only lands if you’ve been paying attention for fifteen years. It’s aimed squarely at people who have. Given my own history with the 2015 Fantastic Four, seeing a genuinely good Johnny Storm turn up at all felt like a small correction of the record.
Cassandra Nova and the Void
The plot is TVA business. Wade’s universe is dying because its Anchor Being, Logan, is dead, and a middle-management bureaucrat named Paradox wants to speed the end along rather than let it decay. Wade goes looking for a replacement Wolverine and comes back with the worst one on the shelf, a Logan who failed his X-Men and has been drinking about it ever since.
They both get dumped in the Void, the purgatory from Loki where pruned things go to be eaten. That’s where the film finds its best character. Cassandra Nova is Charles Xavier’s twin sister and a telepath of genuinely upsetting cruelty, and Emma Corrin plays her with a stillness that most Marvel villains never get near. She isn’t quipping. She’s just deeply unpleasant and very good at it.
Bringing the TVA back in was a smart structural choice too. It gives the film a legitimate reason to be pulling characters out of dead timelines rather than relying on a hand-wave, and it ties this into the wider machinery without making the film feel like homework.
The cameos, and why they mostly work
There’s a version of this film that’s just a nostalgia parade, and it gets close to that line more than once. Elektra, Blade, Gambit, X-23, all pulled out of the Void where the pruned timelines dump their leftovers.
What saves it is the tone. These aren’t victory laps. Every one of these characters is there because their film underperformed, or their franchise got cancelled, or the studio lost interest, and the movie is explicit about that. They’re in purgatory because nobody wanted them. Giving them a fight to go out on is a kinder ending than any of them actually got, and the film plays it closer to a eulogy than a gag.
Blade in particular lands. Wesley Snipes was doing this before the modern superhero film existed, before anybody had proved audiences would turn up, and he’s been more or less written out of the story of how we got here. Putting him back on screen and letting him be good at it is a genuine act of respect.
Does it cheapen Logan?
This is the question I went in with, because Logan is one of the best superhero films anybody has made and it had a perfect ending. Bringing Jackman back always risked undoing that.
It doesn’t, and the reason is the variant framing. This isn’t the Logan who died on that hillside. It’s a different one with a different failure behind him, and the film is careful to keep those separate. That distinction could easily have been a cheap loophole. Here it’s load-bearing, and it lets Jackman play something he never got to play in the Fox run: a Wolverine defined by having already lost, rather than by rage.
He also finally gets the yellow suit. Only took twenty-four years. It looks great, and the film knows exactly how long we’ve been waiting, which is why it doesn’t make a bigger deal of it than it needs to.
Where it sits
The meta-humour is relentless and I can see it wearing thin for some people. It didn’t for me, mostly because the film keeps undercutting its own smugness. Every time it gets too pleased with itself, somebody gets stabbed.
Against the rest of the X-Men material on screen, it’s in a different league from something like X-Men: Apocalypse, which had scale and no soul. It also does more with Wolverine as a character in one film than most of the comics runs I’d point people to manage across whole arcs, though the comparison isn’t quite fair given what it’s borrowing from. And as a Deadpool film specifically, it’s a clear step up from the first one, which I liked a great deal but which was working with a fraction of the budget and none of the toys. If you want the version of Wolverine that gets closest to the best fights in the comics, it’s in here.
I enjoyed this one a lot. Four and a half, maybe a five. Comfortably top of my list for the year so far, and I suspect it stays there.
A note on the rating
I’ve gone back and forth between four and a half and five on this, which is unusual for me. A five normally means a film I think is genuinely excellent rather than merely enjoyable, and by that standard this probably isn’t one. The plot is thin, the middle sags slightly, and a lot of the emotional weight is borrowed from other films rather than generated here.
But there’s a category of film that does exactly what it set out to do, for exactly the audience it was made for, with visible affection and no cynicism. This is that. I had more fun watching it than anything else this year, and I’ve already gone back once. Whatever number that is, it’s a high one.
And then, two weeks ago, this happened
I can’t write this up without mentioning the other thing, because it’s all anybody has talked about since.
Robert Downey Jr. has been announced as Doctor Doom. Not Iron Man. Doom. Announced at Comic-Con the day after this film opened, with the Russos back directing.
I genuinely don’t know what to make of it yet. Part of me thinks it’s a bold swing, and this franchise has needed one. Part of me wonders whether bringing back the actor whose death was the emotional full stop on Endgame reads as confidence or as an admission that they can’t move past him. Recasting him as a different character is either the cleverest possible solution to that problem or a way of having it both ways.
There’s no plot, no cast list, nothing beyond a title and a man in a mask on a stage. So I’ll leave it there. It’s a strange piece of timing, though, landing the same week as a film about one universe being absorbed into another. Ask me again when there’s something to actually go on.