So here comes Shawn Levy’s hilarious “Deadpool & Wolverine,” an apology candygram delivered by the two most mouth-puckeringly sour superheroes Marvel now owns. As Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) quips to Wolverine (Hugh Jackman): “Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point.”
Hey, you’re either the butt of the joke or you’re the studio waggling Reynolds’s keister at the lens while he pokes fun at your own corporate mergers. Wisecracking about his, and their, mistakes like he’s trying to win couples therapy, Deadpool represents what mainstream Marvel flicks couldn’t do: make a hard R-rated movie with more curses per minute than a convention of witches. He’s what they have to do to win back an audience who’s outgrown them.
Sincere contrition would be overkill. But Reynolds’s garrulous assassin doesn’t have a sincere bone in his body — unless he’s been skewered by someone else’s splintered femur, which can happen in a movie like this, where characters start using severed limbs as weapons in the first five minutes. (The fight choreography is mostly great, particularly when constrained by the cubic capacity of a minivan, or by a camera that insists on side-scrolling alongside a bloodbath like an ’80s arcade game.) Deadpool is impervious to bullets and blades; so is his new frenemy, Wolverine, who seems to get more and more ripped as the film progresses. The two can — and do — murder each other for hours and then pause for a snack. Nothing really matters. Nihilism is the dominant mood.
It’d be a stretch to say that Levy (who already directed both leads in “Real Steel” and “Free Guy”) and the four other credited screenwriters have written a plot. Really, they’ve concocted a series of excuses: a reason to bring Deadpool and Wolverine together, a justification to resurrect Wolverine from the grave in the first place after his moving death in James Mangold’s “Logan” (2017), a rationale for Reynolds to tongue-kiss the world’s ugliest dog. Pointedly, the first villain we meet isn’t some laser-fingered demigod but a milquetoast middle manager in an ordinary business suit (“Succession’s” Matthew Macfadyen) who huffs that he must tidy up the timelines of the multiverse. Presiding over a fiefdom of cubicles and cutesy coffee mugs, this joy-killer seems to represent every studio executive who’s ever given a creative a hard time for trying to dazzle a crowd.
Marvel has, of course, been on both sides of those brutal meetings. Over its last two and a half decades, its own internal struggles have become a saga as convoluted as anything in the pages of a comic book.
Here, Marvel scholars could write dissertations on the briefest of sight gags. Those with outside hobbies might at least have a passing memory of the 13 years the company spent trying, and failing, to make a stand-alone movie about a character who finally appears after being unable to fight their way out of development hell. Fans at my screening were cheering that the actor playing the role — not the character itself — had salvaged their moment of triumph, and, in this ridiculous bit of catharsis, restored a much-needed equilibrium to the blockbuster business. After overpaying to keep Robert Downey Jr. playing Iron Man, Marvel has spent decades convincing itself, and audiences, that the super suit matters more than the actor wearing it, junking the century-old wisdom that it’s movie stars who open movies. Like every other modern disrupter from Uber to Airbnb, it broke an industry and then went “oops.”
But with the whole super-racket on the ropes, the cast of “Deadpool & Wolverine” seizes the opportunity to prove the power of their own charisma. Our affection for them trumps everything. We’re rooting less for Deadpool to save the day than for our awareness that Reynolds, who bombed as the Green Lantern, is giving his all to this motor-mouthed murderer and that Jackman, who started slashing claws at 32, is now several years past qualifying for AARP. In turn, the actors agree to make fun of themselves — a gag about Jackman’s recent divorce made the audience around me gasp.
The movie itself barely tries to pull on our emotional heartstrings, and every time it does, the air gets sucked out of the room. Instead, Levy works us over during the end credits with a stream of B-roll footage from past Marvel and X-Men flops. Once, these films were mocked. Now that we’ve all grown older, they’ve taken on the warm sheen of nostalgia.
Exiting the theater, I was clobbered by the realization that “Deadpool & Wolverine” might be this generation’s “American Graffiti,” a salute to feeling young and immortal that ends with the awareness that you either flame out too soon or limp on longer than you expected. As Deadpool says of Wolverine: “Fox killed him, Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s 90.”
R. At area theaters. For strong, bloody violence and language as well as gore and sexual references. 127 minutes.