Good news if you dig the irreverent, self-aware shtick that Ryan Reynolds has honed to a gleaming katana edge as motormouth mercenary Deadpool. In this year’s brashest superhero movie Deadpool & Wolverine, the actor, entrepreneur and Wrexham AFC co-chairman keeps up a near-constant stream of slick quips, smarmy insults and off-colour non-sequiturs.
No fourth wall is safe, especially now the clowning killer in blood-red body armour can roast his new corporate owner-in-full Marvel. For their part, the previously family-focused studio seems happy to wave through all the OTT ultraviolence, liberal F-bombs and non-judgmental references to pegging that have become hallmarks of the Deadpool brand.
- Ms. Marvel: What happens when a superhero’s greatest enemy is the fandom?
- Ryan Reynolds: What Hugh Jackman taught me about musicals
But what if, for some reason, you do not enjoy all the hyperactive Reynolds yammering? Your interests are represented on-screen by Logan AKA the Wolverine (AKA Hugh Jackman). This rather ragged version of the notorious beclawed mutant – plucked, in the current faddish style, from an alternate universe – tests the limits of Deadpool’s regenerative healing power by hacking great chunks out of him whenever the relentless repartee simply gets too much.
The plot piggybacks off the recent Loki streaming series, with a rudderless Deadpool recruited by the Time Variance Authority (TVA) – embodied by Matthew Macfadyen’s entertainingly supercilious middle-manager Paradox – to perform some timeline topiary. This sends Deadpool off on a multiversal quest to find a version of Wolverine who can help him save a universe slated for destruction, or something. (“This is a shit-ton of exposition for a threequel,” notes Deadpool as the stakes are being explained.) The team-up does not go entirely as planned, and our two bickering heroes end up dumped in a purgatorial realm full of secrets and surprises.
Constant antagonism is the engine that keeps Deadpool & Wolverine barrelling forward even as the story veers off into cosmic weirdness. Perhaps it works so well because the co-stars have had time to refine their double-act. Jackman and Reynolds previously co-starred as Wolverine and a prototype version of Deadpool in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine; more recently, the two media-friendly megastars have faked feuds on social media for various good causes.
Uniting these two charismatic actors at a time when the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is perceived to be in a critical and commercial slump feels like a no-brainer, even if their characters became popular when the X-Men franchise was still under the auspices of 20th Century Fox. (“Welcome to the MCU by the way,” Deadpool stage-whispers to his dazed partner at one point, “you’re just joining at a bit of a low point.”)
