Film Review - Deadpool and Wolverine (2024)

Deadpool and Wolverine is the newest Marvel Studios film and the first to properly feature characters from the X-Men now that Marvel Studios has gotten the rights to those characters back after Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019, this story concerns Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) being tasked by the TVA and it’s lead time officer Paradox (Matthew Macfayden) to either join the Earth 616 universe or die with his now that it has lost it’s anchor character in Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) but Deadpool decides not to cooperate and travels the multiverse to find another Wolverine to help him.

Deadpool and Wolverine is something of a mixed bag for me movie wise, I can see why people are having a great time at this movie but I can also see why others have not,

Firstly the best thing about this movie and when it works the best is when Reynolds and Jackman are simply allowed to riff with each other, trade barbs and insults and try to kill each other, the two men have great chemistry together and it’s easy to see why Reynolds was the only person that could get Jackman to play the character again after he bid farewell to it in James Mangold’s Logan in 2017, both men are as good as ever in their roles and the film works best when their on it.

Also really good is Emma Corrin best known as the young Princess Diana in the Crown, they bring a lot of dark energy to their role and I really believed that they and James McAvoy who played Professor Xavier in the previous 20th Century Fox trilogy of X-Men films are related, the MCU has lacked memorable villains in a lot of their films but this one is an exception.

And lastly there are some good action and comedy moments that definitely had me smiling and laughing when they were on screen.

But what really drags this movie into the bog is the multiverse side plot, I am so fucking fed up with this shit now I couldn’t tell you but I will this time because all the multiverse really ends up meaning is that there are no consequences, no stakes in the action and no one really dies and if they do then instead of using the Dragon Balls to bring them back the characters can just hop into the multiverse, find a variant of that character who died and then there they are as if nothing ever happened.

And it just feels so fucking lazy especially when both DC and Marvel have dabbled in this crap and all for some cheap fan service and nostalgia baiting and I don’t care anymore, I remember when people like Mangold and Bryan Singer and Matthew Vaughn gave us X-Men movies that had genuine stakes, exciting action, heartfelt emotion as well as fun comedy and when characters actually died it meant something but now none of it does.

And yes 20th Century Fox as a movie studio made some big big mistakes with their handling of the X-Men and the other Marvel comics characters chief among them their failure to learn the lessons of X-Men 1 and 2 and why those films were as successful as they were in the early 2000’s but when they got it right, they gave you something as a fan or a movie pundit or even just a casual audience member that meant something and could be about something more worthwhile than just one liners, bad comedy, tighty tight and colourful costumes and action scenes that got more and more boring because the villains were so poorly thought out none it mattered.

And Fox as a studio had such a rich movie history as well, those of us like me hear that fanfare and instantly think “Star Wars” and George Lucas wanted to bring that full fanfare back to prominence with the original film in 1977 and along with Disney, Warner Brothers, Columbia, Universal and Paramount were the foundation of the movie business for decades and when Disney acquired Fox primarily because so many Marvel nerds became adamant that they get the X-Men and Fantastic Four to Marvel Studios we lost something fundamental.

And that loss is one that I feel personally when looking at the movie business as it is today and look this movie will make oodles of money and I can see why but given what it was that we lost so this movie could be made as we see it being projected in front of us I wish it was a lot better than it is, don’t get me wrong there is plenty of fun to be had and a good villain is here but the loss of 20th Century Fox as an independent movie studio and the decades of movie going tradition that died with it is one I struggle to overcome but I suspect I’ll be along in feeling this way, 3 out of 5.