"Deadpool and Wolverine" Dumb Down the Dumbed-Down
Just when you thought Marvel couldn't get more nihilistic . . .
Whenever I go to a movie, I expect a work of art, and that’s certainly what anything could be, even — in my rosy view of the world — “Howard the Duck.”
With a Deadpool-and-Wolverine flick, the artistic potential is latent there, really!
You get the wisecracker teaming up with the laconic straight-man, a movie formula as old as theater, featuring two actors who could’ve made it in movies in any era, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.
But we’re in a corporate era for blockbusters, one sadly predicted by cyberpunk as oppressive and repressive, at least as the mainstream goes. Art reduced to mindless commerce, ad infinitum, with no end yet in sight.
So it should be no surprise when I say that both the Deadpool and Wolverine characters are mere toys in this third Deadpool movie — toys or manifestly obvious commercial products hocking other commercial products, such as, no kidding, the Honda Odyssey.
And they do so ironically, trying to simultaneously appeal to Gen-X and Gen-Z, bashing the minivan of my choice as a piece of crap, only to proclaim later on, in Deadpool’s one-word parlance, that “it can really fuck.”
You know that Deadpool speaks that way, and the movie knows, and the writers — all five of them — know that you know that they know that you know. So to no one’s surprise, the entirety of “Deadpool and Wolverine” fills itself with meta-jokes, and even meta-jokes about the meta-jokes. This movie dares to call itself out for using too much exposition, then proceeds to use ten times more the amount of it, because none of the five writers could do any better. One couldn’t be blamed for believing that these “writers” make fun of themselves to justify their own laziness.
Besides all the in-joking about the script itself, add fifty more jokes about Disney’s acquisition of Fox. As a moviegoing normie, I had no insider baseball on Deadpool as a new Disney character, nor as a potential Avenger or X-Man; this movie, however, expects you to know all the corporate wheeling-and-dealing that allowed this third Deadpool to exist.
And if yet you don’t get those business-insider meta-jokes, well, never fear, for there are endless nutsack and anal-probing jokes for the “Ow, My Ballz” crowd.
“Deadpool and Wolverine” rather nakedly cares less about its own plot, so there’s no need to even bother talking about it, even though it uses Marvel’s script formulas to attempt to craft serious moments. But it’s not campy or cheeky enough to know what the proper tone is for the kind of lowbrow work it wants to be.
Because computers are presumably in charge at Disney, using formulas that tell the five writers what script beats there should be, there never can be a truly glorious piece of camp from Marvel. They still expect us to take men in tights seriously at times.
None of the serious moments can land, mainly because “serious” doesn’t pair well with crassness and with reckless nonchalance about guys getting stabbed in the balls with adamantium blades. Deadpool and Wolverine can never die, seemingly, so they stab each other approximately eighty-five thousand times, blood launching out of every stab wound onto the seats and roof of the Honda Odyssey they fight inside.
Why they are fighting inside a Honda Odyssey is rather naked and obvious: selling a piece of commerce to us. Never have Honda’s marketing ideas been this dumb.
Nevermind — I can tell you the plot. Deadpool wants to save his own universe instead of becoming what personally he wants, which is an Avenger. He’s given a devil’s bargain by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfayden), a sort of timelord tasked with quickly ending Deadpool’s universe because it lost its “anchor being.” That being was Logan, otherwise known as Wolverine, who died at the end of the 2017 movie “Logan.” Deadpool must find another Wolverine somewhere in the infinite multiverse in order to save his own, rather than to allow the timelord to delete the universe he loves.
As you can see, this plot is straight camp and nothing more.
That Marvel takes its own multiverse seriously still should be the ultimate joke that makes us all loudly howl — at them and them alone.
I’m rather put off. “Logan” was a really fine movie, though quite brutal, an SF Western that took its themes and world as if the stakes in art carried over into the stakes of the real world. Wolverine, a real Gen-X hero, needs seriousness. He’s an angsty bastard, an American loner, a loser, a brooding outcast.
That’s all felt as real by guys like me, who really liked the ‘90s X-Men animated series and some-or-all of the X-Men fare featuring the Logan character.
But this “three-quel” is a Deadpoolization of Logan, or actually a Marvelization of him. Whatever Marvel touches, they turn to garbage IP, a character to be killed and brought back endlessly, a play toy for them to make money on and no more. (Deadpool’s joke is that he needs to bring Logan back for the “residuals,” so he will therefore “dishonor” the movie “Logan,” meaning that Marvel couldn’t care less if you liked that ending to Wolverine’s life at the movies. They will trash it for their own profit, and taunt you with that fact within the movie’s first five minutes.)
God knows what they would do to Batman if they got a hold of him. God be praised that they couldn’t do this “shit,” as Deadpool would say, to Odysseus, Dante, or Don Quixote.
Imagine Marvel’s version of “The Odyssey.” They’d be hyping products to you while making Odysseus, after he takes a sword to the gonads, say unpoetical lines like “my knife is now going to fuck your face.”
By contrast, “Howard the Duck” looks like the work of ancient geniuses of a long-ago century.