Preaching to the nerd choir

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This article was published 26/07/2024 (779 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s an online entertainment site listing the 13 MCU and MCU-adjacent movies and streaming series you need to catch up on before watching Deadpool & Wolverine.

How you feel about the MCU’s latest piece of Intellectual Property will probably depend on how you feel about the infinitely expanding and intricately interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe. Is it fun, or is it homework? Or maybe fun homework?

Of course, Deadpool himself, played with a certain sewer-mouthed charm by Ryan Reynolds, is going to get out ahead of these questions. (Along with his ability to regenerate, Deadpool’s main superpower is snarky self-awareness, and he’s constantly breaking the fourth wall to chat directly to the audience.)

At one point he admits that an upcoming scene will make more sense if you’ve seen “Loki, Season 1, Episode 5.”

Deadpool uses a similar pre-emptive strategy to inoculate the movie against everything critics complain about in the MCU canon — “gratuitous cameos,” “indiscriminate use of time variants,” “unnecessarily long runtimes.” (We’re in the homestretch,” Deadpool reassures us around the two-hour mark.)

He talks about rights issues and corporate mergers — with lots of digs at Fox and Disney — about money grabs and focus-group testing. Copping to the MCU’s convoluted output of reboots and resets, spinoffs and sequels, his patter is full of in-jokes and fan service. Deadpool often speaks directly to “the nerds.” (His words, not mine.)

So, what runs underneath all this meta-meta-meta commentary? Well, not much. Directed by Canadian-born Shawn Levy (Free Guy) and written by a typing pool that includes Levy, Reynolds and a few others, this cheerfully nasty buddy pic is a pretty standard Marvel outing.

After a flash-forward that involves Deadpool’s constant comic commentary and some (literal) head-exploding violence, we meet a rather subdued Wade Wilson, Deadpool’s regular-guy identity. Having tried to join the Avengers and gotten a hug-it-out rejection from Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), Wade has lost his relationship with the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and taken a job as a used-car salesman.

Then Wade is picked up by the Time Variance Authority, the organization that polices the multiverse’s many timelines. He is taken to meet Mr. Paradox, a hilariously officious petty bureaucrat played by Matthew Macfadyen, who informs Wade his version of Earth is slated to be destroyed.

Deadpool vows to step up, but he’ll need the help of Logan (Hugh Jackman), a.k.a. Wolverine, currently presumed dead. Searching through multiple timelines, Deadpool somehow ends up with the “worst Wolverine,” a version of the man who’s washed up, alcoholic and embittered — though admittedly still ripped.

These two make an odd couple. They’re both Canadian, western Canadian even, with Wolverine hailing from northern Alberta and Deadpool from Saskatchewan. But that’s where the similarities end.

Deadpool’s filmography tends toward intentionally adolescent, ass-obsessed comedy and slapstick ultraviolence, while Logan’s last film was a mournful dramatic story about age, fragility, obsolescence and death.

There’s a tonal showdown between Wolverine and Deadpool’s different vibes — Deadpool definitely wins — along with some slow-mo, consequence-free physical fighting between the two men. But they manage to put their differences aside when they end up in The Void, the vast limbo where the TVA sends creatures who have been pruned from various time strands.

Because of Deadpool’s showbiz-conscious approach, these inhabitants include the remnants of franchises that never took off and stars with bad box office. That means cameos, of course. Lots of cameos, including one surprise cameo that surprises twice. (Three times, actually, if you stay for the end of the credits.)

There are passing references to Star Trek, Mad Max, Dune and The Wizard of Oz. There are wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes about Reynold’s acting ability and threats that Jackman might sing the whole second act of The Music Man.

Meanwhile, back in the movie’s actual story, the good guys take on what Deadpool has previously identified as a “British villain” trope, here played by Emma Corrin (The Crown), who brings their spiky, fascinating screen presence to the character of Cassandra Nova.

Playing maliciously with the space-time continuum, Cassandra threatens to end of the world as we know it.

But do we care? When infinite worlds exist, when characters perpetually regenerate, are there any stakes in their storytelling?

“The multiverse is over,” Deadpool says at one point. “It’s just miss after miss after miss.”

But even as the movie seems to admit there’s a problem — when Deadpool welcomes Wolverine to the MCU, he adds that he’s “joined at a low point” — it seems unable, or unwilling, to do anything about it.

Hardcore fans might see Deadpool & Wolverine as a hit. It’s got blood splatter, comic zingers, some fuzzy nostalgia and a whole lot of arcane insider details.

Less Marvel-ardent viewers, though, might view it as just another miss.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca