If nothing else, this illustrates the point perfectly Deadpool and Wolverine Taking place in a liminal space called “The Void”. The franchise latest assault from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)—and, mercifully, the only formal entry this year—is an empty exercise in winking self-promotion, like a made-for-YouTube fan film that somehow ended up on the big Screen. It’s a dull, frenetic movie about how Marvel’s hugely successful comic book movie universe has lost the ability to truly connect – itself being incapable of truly connecting.
Think of the old screenwriter’s adage: “Raise the stakes.” The basic idea is that a good story should reveal what a character cares about most in the world and then put that in danger. This enhances the drama and engages the audience. The audience cares about the characters because the characters care about things that matter to them.
Deadpool, one of the film’s two eponymous characters, doesn’t care about anything in the film. Oh sure: In theory, he pretends that his mission is to save a group of close friends we see in the opening minutes of the film. Their timeline—their branch of the multiverse—is about to be destroyed by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), the in-universe bureaucracy Marvel has used over the past few years to rectify and clean up their narrative missteps.
But the stakes of the movie have nothing to do with Deadpool’s friends or their timeline. That’s because the stakes of the movie are, and often are, very clear to the Marvel Cinematic Universe itself. Throughout the film, Deadpool refers to himself as the Marvel Jesus as he fights to save the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So from the get-go, the movie becomes a knowing, ever-playful homage to the Marvel Universe, complete with montage reels of fan-favorite moments (remember End Game?) and jokes about the franchise’s poor state (“You’re at a low point,” Deadpool says to Wolverine). By the end of the movie, this state of affairs is even sadder.
Even before the Marvel opening logo has played, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds, at his most successful and annoying) starts interrupting to tell the audience how exciting this is. He offered up some crude and joke-filled explanations for what was about to happen, namely Wolverine, a Marvel Comics character who had previously been excluded from the Marvel Cinematic Universe for reasons external to the intellectual property (The Wolverine and His fellow X-Men (all owned by Fox) would eventually become part of the series (as Marvel parent company Disney acquired Fox).
Sure, the setting is explained through cartoonishly gory slow-motion violence and plenty of raunchy, R-rated quips, but at its core, it has all the heart and excitement of reading an M&A report. type.
The first problem with Deadpool is that in the Fox movies where Wolverine has already appeared, Wolverine is already dead. So he must use TVA gadgets to find another Wolverine from an alternate timeline (TVA bureaucracy once again serves as an important crutch for fixing the series’ extra-universe blunders). This allowed him to meet other versions of Wolverine – all of which were either homages to beloved comic book legends or rumors of unmade comic book movies from over a decade ago. The rest of the film is similarly packed with cameos and Easter eggs, to the point where the crude self-reference overpowers everything else. It has little to say about these homages to comic book movie legends. As a fan, it’s enough for you to recognize the reference. This is the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV in approval” meme in feature-length form.
Deadpool and Wolverine is a product, not a movie, and its target audience is those poor, sad souls who have invested years of their lives following not only the characters in Marvel comics and movies, but also the behind-the-scenes business saga involving intellectual property disputes and studio marketing strategies, as well as unfulfilled projects and failures in the early days of the superhero movie boom. This is a movie for middle-aged nerds who still remember the Hollywood columns wizard Magazine circa 1994. I still really love Marvel’s comic book characters. But I’m old enough to know that this stuff is pandering, superficial, and horrible.
The fundamental problem is Deadpool and Wolverine It’s Deadpool and Wolverine that’s not the story. Marvel—the brand, the comics, the movies, the franchises, the wildly successful but recently troubled corporate entity—is the story. I’m a Marvel fan not because I care about the corporate brand entity in some abstract sense, but because I care about the characters, the stories, their adventures, and the real stakes in their lives. This movie doesn’t.
The MCU didn’t just lose plot. It became a plot because it clearly had no other story to tell.
