The Marvel Cinematic Universe just got very bloody. The long-awaited team-up of Hugh Jackman’s bad-tempered Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’s foul-mouthed Deadpool is a savage upper cut of a movie that really commits to earning its 15 rating – a first for MCU movies, following The Walt Disney Company’s purchase of 21st Century Fox, which previously made Deadpool, Wolverine and all the X-Men films, and whose characters are now going to be integrated into the MCU in an attempt to fix the flailing superhero franchise.
MCU films have until now been teen-friendly, but Deadpool & Wolverine has Tarantino-worthy blood spatter – swords through throats, blades in bums – and lewd banter that covers everything from boners to cocaine. The Marvels this is not.
In the comics the frenemy duo – both blessed and cursed with the ability to heal from even the most noxious wounds – are a long-time fan favourite, but on screen we’ve only ever seen Logan fight the Merc with the Mouth back in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, when Reynolds’s Deadpool was a mute assassin who incurred online wrath for deviating from the quippy antihero of the source material.
Reynolds has worked hard to move on from that with the Deadpool reboots (2016 and 2018), and here, the character is joyfully obscene. Director Shawn Levy sets the tone straight out the gate with a pre-credits scene that sees Deadpool brutally slaughter multiple people while wearing a key character’s skeleton, making necrophilia jokes and campily shaking his booty to the NSYNC.
He’s a perfect foil for Wolverine, bringing some hilarity to Jackman’s well-honed seriousness. Deadpool is now a failed car salesman with a toupée, rejected by The Avengers and his girlfriend and in need of a superhero to help him save his loved ones from extinction as a result of his universe disintegrating (it’s complicated). When he and a distinctly reluctant, Jim Beam-swilling Wolverine find themselves banished together to a Mad Max-style desert known as The Void, fighting a (surprise) supervillain played by Emma Corrin (channelling an evil Princess Diana), he’s anxious to make his mark and assembles a motley crew of “good guys”.
Inconveniently, Wolverine died in the last film (the Oscar-nominated Logan in 2017), but the film deals with this via alternate universes and nifty humour about studios relentlessly resurrecting their most bankable stars: “How’re we going to do this without dishonouring Logan’s legacy? We’re not,” deadpans Deadpool in one of his trademark fourth wall-breaking quips.
The film leans heavily into this type of meta comedy. There are running gags about the studios (“Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point”), a slew of Marvel cameos chuckling about their career failures, and even filthy jokes about Gossip Girl, the flagship show of Reynolds’s real-life wife Blake Lively (who appears alongside her daughter). It’s a rollicking ride through Marvel and pop culture history.
Deadpool & Wolverine can occasionally feel more like an in-joke than an actual movie, with the plot a little thin. It would have benefitted from giving Corrin more to do, and Matthew Macfadyen too, as Paradox, the deliciously hapless villain who works at the multiverse watchdog. Levy also depends too heavily on a pumping soundtrack and slo-mo sequences, which are fun but overused.
But the affable chemistry between Reynolds and Jackson carries the film, as does its full-hearted embrace of that strangely successful Deadpool tone – silly, sarcastic and outrageously violent.
If it doesn’t quite feel like a reset for Marvel, the film’s persistent self-awareness nonetheless feels like a love letter to superheroes, with a battle between Deadpool and Wolverine, set to Grease’s “You’re the One That I Want”, that is absolutely worth the wait.
In cinemas on Friday