REVIEW: “Deadpool & Wolverine” Is Empty, Hollow Fan Service

By Jacob Jones

It may seem at first glance, given all the odds stacked against it, that the very existence of a film like Deadpool & Wolverine should be regarded as an out-and-out triumph, and in some manners of speaking, it could be considered one. The opening weekend box office was practically guaranteed to be overwhelmingly large (to the degree that any film’s box office in the year of our lord 2024 can be a guarantee), the CinemaScore for the film is an A, the Rotten Tomatoes numbers look solid even on the critics’ side, and the myriad of production roadblocks the film had to overcome just to get made – from Disney’s acquisition of Fox to an entire worldwide pandemic between films to SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes taking place during filming – could make even the most anti-superhero critic offer up some sympathy votes toward the idea of the film actually coming to pass. But ideas are not final products, and in a cinematic manner of speaking, Deadpool & Wolverine’s final form is as shallow and unremarkable as any of its lesser MCU contemporaries are typically regarded – in truth, it’s far from a triumph at all.
 
This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have anything in it to recommend; the fan service itself is rather inspired in a vacuum, and a couple of key performances – chiefly Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine and Emma Corrin’s introduction as Cassandra Nova – actually shine in a few spots despite the script giving them very little to work with. Jackman in particular brings real pathos and weight to a performance that could easily have just been a cruise control job. Plus, despite my issues with the music supervision on the film as a whole, the introductory titles sequence’s use of *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” remains a great deal of fun. Past that sequence, however, the “fun” of Deadpool & Wolverine becomes less about rewarding audiences for investing in the story or characters, and more about distracting the viewer from the fact that the movie has nothing of real weight to offer. In fact, there really isn’t much of a story at all. There’s a plot (or at least the outline of a plot), locations, characters, action beats, etc, but none of it ever congeals into something meaningful or cohesive. Rather than use its fan service as an additive or enhancement to the storytelling, D&W instead elects to use fan service as storytelling, bouncing from cameo to cameo without much rhyme or reason and squeezing every last drop out of any recognizable, newly-Disney-owned IP it can get its hands on. (There’s also a particularly egregious Furiosa joke that makes less and less sense the more one thinks on it.) This is made especially apparent by how the film chooses to deploy its soundtrack, which is chock full of recognizable songs, most of which come careening through the speakers at seemingly random moments with little – if any – connection to what’s on screen, and a not insignificant portion of which are played for a less than a second during a scene where Deadpool is smashing Wolverine’s head against a radio. Even most of the characters we’ve come to know and love from the other Deadpool films, like Vanessa, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Dopinder, Colossus, etc – characters we’ve grown attached to – are shoved to the side in favor of getting Deadpool to the “Void” so we can get to all those fan service cameos quicker, a big one of which turns out to be fairly disappointing given the actor’s single-note performance in the film.
 
But perhaps D&W’s greatest sin, even more than the hollow fan service or the less-than-half joke hit rate, or even the fact that it’s also quite an ugly-looking movie (does Disney just not do location shoots anymore?), the cardinal nail in the coffin for both the film itself and its vision of the MCU going forward, is its treatment of the chief piece of X-Men film history that’s renowned for its artistic vision and genuine emotional depth: Logan. Without question the best X-Men film to date, Deadpool & Wolverine takes the legacy of closure and catharsis that both audiences and Logan’s titular character finally experienced after 17 years of Hugh Jackman’s stewardship, and turns it into a punchline before outright robbing it of any sense of finality. Whatever your patience for Ryan Reynolds’ shtick as Deadpool (and being a fan of the first two films, I know I have enough patience to still enjoy the bits where he’s just playing the character), the very idea of a studio such as Marvel refusing to let a genuine artistic endeavor that was meant to act as finale be a finale – just because they own the rights to it now and have the option to undo its finality – is probably the biggest indicator as to why their multiverse plans have gone so awry. Stories need endings, but if there’s one thing Disney doesn’t seem to believe in, according to D&W, it’s that.
 
As unfortunate as it is, all I got out of this movie is that the MCU is far more desperate to be liked again than I initially thought, to the point that they’ll throw any amount of money at fan service just to buy back audiences’ good will, regardless of how little sense most of it makes both in the larger context of both the MCU and in this film proper. There are bound to be a lot of people who will have tons of fun watching this movie for that very fan service, and that’s great, but for me, it’s the cinematic equivalent of dangling a mobile in front of a baby in order to distract them from the fact that the dangler has nothing of actual substance to offer. And if this, plus Disney shelling out over $80 million just to get RDJ back into the MCU and bringing back the Russo Brothers to direct more Avengers movies is a sign of just how desperate things have actually become, I’m afraid whatever good will I’ve had towards the post-Endgame phase of this undertaking is likely to be quickly squandered into relative detachment, or worse, active disinterest.
 
I’m giving “Deadpool & Wolverine” a 4.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan