R-rated, bloody superhero flick for Millennials

It’s quite fitting that one of the main characters in Deadpool & Wolverine is named Paradox. That’s exactly what this movie feels like. With his fourth-wall breaking antics, Deadpool has always been able to have it both ways (pun intended), which worked to great effect in Deadpool and well enough in Deadpool 2. Here, it’s used to both embrace and subvert the MCU, adding in R-rated elements while following a tried-and-true formula. It’s a movie that wants to be part of the MCU but also wants to celebrate (and mourn) 20th Century Fox.

Deadpool & Wolverine manages to be a movie that feels both overwhelming and completely inconsequential. It’s wildly entertaining yet entirely familiar. It’s anarchic yet somehow quite safe. Its surprises are not new, and its ability to point out its missteps (Deadpool assures the audience at one point that they’re wrapping up after a couple lingering, meandering scenes) both forgives and highlights them. It’s a movie that you, in fact, don’t really need to have seen anything that comes before to enjoy it (not even Logan or Deadpool), but there are payoffs if you have.

There are a lot of ways the movie is paradoxical, but I do think there is one throughline. Deadpool doesn’t declare it like he has in the previous films, starting off the first claiming it was a love story and then the second one being about family. But I think those of my generation will be able to see what kind of story it is: a tribute to pop culture-obsessed Millennials, particularly those who have followed superhero films, for better or worse.

Deadpool & Wolverine is a lot of movie, and it’s quite fun, and I don’t know if anything else about it really matters.

Release date, rating, and runtime

Deadpool & Wolverine opens on July 26. Like the past films in the Deadpool franchise, it comes with an R-rating, making it the first MCU film with such a designation. There is a lot of profanity, blood, and drug references. I caught it during a pre-release screening in IMAX, but it’s also available in 3D, IMAX 3D, 4DX, and regular 2D.

An MCU movie, Deadpool-style

A raucous, hilarious, and sometimes meandering superhero diversion

Like previous Deadpool installments, the movie begins with Wade Wilson in the middle of a fight, with dismembered bodies piling up, before soon taking us back a bit in time to explain how he got there, and what his motivation was. The quest, at least to the audience, is not really crucial to appreciating the film, and the movie rightly doesn’t spend too much time on the exposition. After a few events, Deadpool is recruited by a version of the TVA, led by a man named Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), and told his world is going to end because it lacks an anchor, a figure of such significance that a timeline will collapse without it. That figure isn’t Deadpool, but Wolverine, and if he wants to save his world, he’ll need to find one (just not the one from Logan, since he’s dead already).

It’s the first of many ways the movie wants to have it all. It doesn’t minimize the story of Logan, but Deadpool does do a number on his corpse.

The intricacies of this call to action don’t quite matter. What matters is that Deadpool wants to do something bigger than himself. He wants to feel important and support a higher cause (a very funny early scene sees him applying for a job with the Avengers). With those closest to him set to vanish from existence, Deadpool is ready to sacrifice himself and die a noble death like his hero Wolverine.

What unfolds is both fun and familiar, the same but different, echoing so many Marvel movies that came before. It just has a lot more foul language, bloody deaths, and fourth-wall mockery. For instance, before Deadpool and Wolverine can become unlikely allies in their quest, they need to fight first, a battle that Deadpool declares is for the nerds. And it is. Just like when Captain America fought Iron Man or when Thor fought Hulk.

The second act takes place in the Void, a place previously experienced in Loki Season 1, which, if you didn’t see, Deadpool tells you is from Loki Season 1. It serves as a wasteland for those that the TVA has deemed unnecessary or dangerous, a place of no escape (until conveniently, there is) filled with characters that will be familiar to many Millennials. The Void also introduces us to a villain, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), a character whose main trait is that she is related to someone fans will already know, and whose powers are completely unstoppable (until conveniently, they aren’t).

A third act, where the heroes regroup, uncover a hastily put-together new threat, and features a bunch of cinematic fights before revealing a singular way to defeat a powerful MacGuffin, will again all feel very familiar to Marvel fans.

Though this all sounds pretty dire, the way Deadpool & Wolverine presents itself makes it instead feel like absurd, joyous fun instead of something more cynical, and that’s largely because it knows its audience, and is self-aware to call out its own pandering. It could be far more ambitious, and it certainly lacks a plot of any significance or coherence, but the film does have Deadpool dancing to *NSYNC, Wolverine in his iconic yellow suit, and one slo-mo hero shot after another. That’s what my generation, and many others I’m sure, could use right now in the theater.

Verdict: A fitting end to an era

Deadpool & Wolverine is nostalgic comfort food covered in blood and packed full of profanity that does a lot more for the memory of 20th Century FOX than it does for the current MCU. It will be curious to see how the film is received, which I suspect will be generally positive, and justifiably so.

But it borrows much from those that came before, with echoes of Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and even The Marvels. It has all the pitfalls of some of the worst Marvel films, but there is an earnestness about the characters that makes all of that seem a little superfluous.

It doesn’t set a new course for the MCU in ways that were expected. Instead, it reminds studios that, given some proper time and resources, a group of dedicated professional nerds who care about audiences can make something enjoyable and even artistic that still makes a lot of money: the most important paradox of them all.

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