Deadpool & Wolverine: Is the MCU Back?

This review may contain very light spoilers

Based on the packed theatre I had the honour of being a part of for the Thursday night showing of Deadpool & Wolverine here in Cornwall (before the movie officially theatrically released), I can only assume that 2024 has a new future champion of the title ‘highest grossing film.’

But is the hype deserved? It’s no secret that film studios can get away with just reusing popular IP that has proven to be a cash cow in the past, often in a way that’s lazy and honestly insulting. For an example of this, look no further than the state of the child animation genre, where beautifully animated stories like Nimona can’t get a theatrical release whereas every film in the Despicable Me franchise is destined to rake in a billion dollars.

All of this is to say that, While Deadpool & Wolverine has already raked in nearly $500m as of my writing this 2 days after its release, box office success and quality are not always correlated. In this case, however, they are.

I want to make it clear that this movie was going to be huge regardless, but it is going to help that it was very arguably the funniest Deadpool movie, as evidenced by my theatre erupting in laughter every other line. I’d say the two funniest aspects of the movie are the fourth-wall breaks that Deadpool can pull off because of Marvel’s acquisition of his character, and the dynamic between he (an unserious sarcastic anti-hero) and Wolverine (the most serious man you’ll ever meet). My favourite part about the fourth-wall breaks, though, is how topical they feel. It’s pretty hard to not feel out-of-touch when directly addressing an audience that will only see whatever you write over a year later, and I don’t know if lines were spontaneously changed to fit modern slang, but Reynolds’ character fully feels like he’s addressing us in real time throughout the film.

On top of the humour, the other standout aspect of this movie is action. Oh my goodness, the action. Without going into too much detail, and using information made available by the trailers, I can say the Deadpool and Wolverine tussle a little bit, and the choreography in the fight is absolutely insane. For any diehard Marvel fans, watching this fight alone is probably enough to warrant watching this movie. But on the topic of action, there’s so much more. The villain’s unique powers are an SFX feast, we see some unexpected characters with some of the most unique powers in Marvel brought to the big screen beautifully, and a certain fight between Deadpool, Wolverine, and a large group of fighters is probably going to go down as a classic MCU scene.

As for my critique of the film, I will say this: it employs one of my least favourite kinds of plotlines: the main character gets stuck somewhere and spends most of the movie trying to make it out. Especially when paired with the exposition that this character has a lot of unresolved troubles, this kind of storyline often just feels like we took a 2 hour detour around any character development. The film’s ending does make up for this a little bit, but this is a similar trope as Quantumania, and was my biggest problem with that film.

When considering what this plotline and its characters mean for the future of the MCU, though, I can forgive this minor misstep. Because folks, with the acquisition of characters like Deadpool & Wolverine, and the reveal that Robert freakin’ Downey Jr. will be playing Doctor Doom, it’s safe to say that the MCU may be at a 5-year-high.

8/10