Deadpool & Wolverine Review - IGN (2024)

Deadpool and Wolverine opens in US theaters on Friday, July 26, 2024.

Deadpool and Wolverine saw you from across the bar, and they like your vibe. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t enjoyed the MCU since Avengers: Endgame pushed the stakes of the franchise off a cliff, or if you’re cautiously optimistic about the rest of the Multiverse Saga – come for Deadpool and Wolverine’s blockbuster chemistry, but stay for the frankness with which they comment on the past, present, and future of Marvel Studios. And it’s a good thing that they do. The MCU has been bloated and unfocused for years now, and it’s about time someone let the air out and had some fun with it. In that way, Deadpool & Wolverine is a perfectly timed and well-sustained cinematic fart, released with confidence and comfort in the space it creates for future nourishment. It’s not going to single-handedly save the MCU from the larger bout of indigestion it’s suffering through, but it’s a refreshing mea culpa that demonstrates that Marvel can still let 'er rip loud and proud when it really counts.

The Shawn Levy-directed superhero comedy gets off to a roaring start, with Deadpool riffing on the action before the Marvel Studios fanfare is even finished and running afoul of the Time Variance Authority from Loki almost immediately. There’s an electricity to the opening act – after all, this is Deadpool’s first time in the MCU, and like a comfortably inebriated cousin giggling into your ear after Thanksgiving dinner, there’s no sure way to know what weird, hilarious nonsense will spill out of his mouth, or how hard it will make your aunt clutch her pearls. With a decade-plus of Marvel Studios storytelling (and marketing) to skewer, Ryan Reynolds is off to the races with jokes aimed at every corner of the Sacred Timeline. Reynolds’ command of Wade Wilson’s whipping wit is wazor-sharp as ever – applying it to the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he’s able to bring the self-important franchise down to Earth. You can practically see Reynolds slamming a binder full of Kevin Feige-focused jokes onto a table and recording every single one. The self-referential material is unpredictable and incisive – enough at first to make this the most dangerous the MCU has felt since there were six Infinity Stones on the board.

One of the biggest questions going into Deadpool & Wolverine was whether the MCU’s first R-rating would be enough to sustain the filthy, subversive tone that set the Merc with a Mouth apart from the pack in the first place. That disgusting, irradiated heart is very much intact, and if the idea of Wade and Logan trading curses every 10 seconds is all it’ll take to get you to the theaters, rest assured you will leave well f*****g fed. But I can’t look Mr. Pool in the face and lie to him and tell him I didn’t detect some pulled punches, some jokes that walk right up to the line of being truly fearless, only to double back or change the subject quickly. With all the big laughs and self-deprecation in play, it’s hard to begrudge the filmmakers for sanding off some of the character’s harder edges – but it’s still a little disappointing that Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t try to top some of DP’s more heinous on-screen acts.

Speaking of: We don’t make it 10 minutes into Deadpool & Wolverine before Wade gleefully desecrates our memories of Logan – the character, and James Mangold’s 2017 film. It’s another tightrope Deadpool & Wolverine has to walk: Logan is still correctly regarded as a high-point of superhero cinema, and even though audiences are more or less used to the idea of variants now, bringing Hugh Jackman back in all his clawed, costumed glory still runs the risk of feeling tacky after his previous, borderline perfect farewell to the X-Man. But Jackman, an actor known for his great showmanship and ability to Wolverine really well, threads the needle of a post-Logan return to the role, clearly relishing every f-bomb and flash of berserker rage.

There’s undoubtedly some cognitive dissonance at first, as the movie asks the audience to map decades of esteem onto a variant we’re meeting for the first time. But in the end, this movie’s Wolverine has all of the reluctant heroism and self-loathing you’d expect from any depiction of Logan, and the redemption he’s after is personal enough that these sticking points feel less distracting as the movie goes on. But Deadpool & Wolverine reminds us that nothing, Timeline aside, is sacred, and playing fast and loose with the rules is the name of the game.

Jackman and Reynolds have been road-testing their chemistry on social media for years now, and Deadpool & Wolverine proves their catty one upmanship can sustain a feature-length adventure. There’s a trust and ease between the stars that puts their banter head and shoulders above most of their MCU contemporaries – again, years and years of de facto rehearsal and an R-rating give them a lot of leeway. As a buddy comedy, Deadpool & Wolverine is rock solid, but it falls prey to the perfunctory plotting that has plagued other recent Marvel movies. It grinds to a halt any time there’s exposition to attend to, and while Deadpool sure does like to joke about that fact in real time, clunky plot junk still hits the ear like clunky plot junk. Much of that exposition gets dumped in the lap of the TVA’s Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), the timeline cop (or, middle manager) who eventually enlists Deadpool’s help. Paradox’s influence on events after his initial encounter with Deadpool is limited, and the movie largely moves past him after the first act.

The incomprehensible plot isn’t helped by Deadpool & Wolverine’s bland primary setting: the Void, a trash heap at the end of time first introduced in Disney+’s Loki series. The nondescript, bleak terrain makes the already-thin stakes even harder to hang onto as the movie goes. We’re regularly reminded of the reality and the family that Deadpool’s trying to save, and yet our only connection to them are the Polaroid that Wade flashes the few times the story calls for him to be earnest. It’s also in the Void where the mysterious Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) holds court, driven by off-the-shelf villain motivations that feel totally mismatched to her erratic, impish nature. Deadpool and Wolverine benefit from years of audience goodwill, with connections to worlds and characters that give them an emotional leg up. But as a creature of the Void with nearly no link to anything or anyone, Cassandra (and, by extension, Corrin) ends up totally swept away by more familiar characters.

Deadpool & Wolverine’s boring, budget-friendly wasteland does at least open events up to promised cameos and variants in a way that, for all of Deadpool’s undercutting, actually treats the fabric of the MCU’s internal reality with some respect. A marauding group of veteran Fox mutants like Pyro (Aaron Stanford, from the second and third X-Men movies) and Sabretooth (Tyler Mane, from the first one) open the door to even more surprising appearances, which range in significance and utility from “my brain recognizes that character and that makes my brain happy” to “we’ve closed the loop on one of the subgenre’s greatest missed opportunities.” Deadpool & Wolverine’s self-awareness is most effective when it’s honoring the pillars on which the MCU is built, namely Fox’s work to build superhero franchises at the turn of the 21st century. Deadpool & Wolverine converses with that history thoughtfully, and with more tenderness than you might expect.