After an immensely profitable opening weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine is on track to dominate the international summer box office. Clearly, it’s hit a sweet spot for audiences. It combines nostalgia for superhero movies past with a relentless barrage of witty acknowledgements that the whole genre, when you get right down to it, was all a bunch of crap anyways.
The crap theme is very thoroughly sustained by writer-director Shawn Levy. In the film, both title characters are depicted as down-and-out rejects, cast out of more respectable superhero circles. Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) — back in a belated sequel to Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018) — is desperate for a shot at Avengers team membership. But he botches the job interview and winds up as the ultimate loser, newly single after his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) breaks up with him. He’s left working as a used car salesman with a bad toupee staple-gunned to his head.
“It’s a hair system,” he insists. “Balayage.”
He’s offered another shot at achieving greatness by a scheming Time Variance Authority (TVA) bureaucrat Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen of Succession in amusing British villain mode). Inquiring about the job on offer, Deadpool asks, “Will I marvel at how cinematic it is?”
But it turns out his superhero dream job will have to be in another universe because Deadpool’s own world is being steadily destroyed. Deadpool finds that this is an offer he can definitely refuse, because even if his own life is garbage, he still has friends in this world who are worth rescuing. Nine friends, to be exact, who all recently attended his surprise birthday party, and he carries around the Polaroid shot to prove it. Among the friends I was pleased to see Rob Delaney still on the payroll as fellow car salesman Peter Wisdom, and Leslie Uggams still playing Deadpool’s cocaine-loving roommate “Blind Al.”
Sample dialogue:
WOLVERINE (appalled): “You…
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Auteur: Eileen Jones
