Deadpool & Wolverine

Deadpool and Wolverine first appeared in comics together in Wolverine (volume 2) issue #88. That was in late 1994, roughly 30 years ago. Deadpool's first comics appearance was just three years before, in the page of New Mutants as an antagonist. Wolverine's first appearance was also in someone else's comic, depending on how you slice it either the last panel of #180 or otherwise issue #181 of The Incredible Hulk. That was 20 years earlier, 50 years (less about a week) before Deadpool & Wolverine hit screens.

Wolverine is perhaps infamous for appearing in other titles, and he's one of a tiny handful of characters (beyond Professor X and Magneto, and even then...) to appear in every iteration of the X-Men. Or rather, almost every iteration, as he wasn't in their first run from 1963 to 1970 or the repeats that ran until 1975, but was in the Giant Size X-Men that restarted the franchise after he'd turned up to fight Wendigo and the big beryl Bruce Banner. I shan't go into which Wendigo that was, as even I know when to go away from too much detail. Though nit-pickers and freeze-framers will have plenty in the film to look out for, as it rivals The Great Wolverine Guest Star Streak for the density of its references and allusions to other bits of the Marvel universe(s).

Let's start with the homework. You don't need to have seen Logan or Deadpools first and second but there are effectively spoilers for both. Nearly instantly for Logan - it's referenced in the immediate aftermath of Deadpool joining in with the Marvel theme. You should probably have seen the series Loki, and in fact both seasons of it are vital to setup. The whole business of branches and pruning does become more than a bit metatextual though, and it's here that I found myself reminded of The Flash.

You wait however long for a quippy superhero in a red suit to engage in alternate timelines in ways dependent upon references to Back To The Future and then two come along at once. Well, not 'at once'. One is maybe premature. Or immature. Whichever version of that seems funnier. You don't have to pick between cake and eating it, Deadpool will cater.

Or perhaps pander, because Deadpool & Wolverine is so intent on giving fans what it thinks they want that it won't win any new ones. I've remarked before that the MCU's been remarkably successful in replicating the evolution of comic-books, breakout success becoming mass-market sensibilities becoming diminishing returns as they fall into rabbit holes of ever increasing complexity.

If we treat it as an MCU movie, and it can and cannot claim to be, it's the 34th. I'm not joking about the homework. I've got no idea what it'd be like to see this without a background in these films, there's not much of a story independent of anything else. With references to several other Marvel titles not within that continuity, including but not limited to X-Men, Blade, Elektra and at least one iteration of the Fantastic Four, the actual count is much higher. I'm not even going to count Spider-Men, though some scenes share a similar cosplay smorgasbord sensibility as elements of Across The Spider-Verse. Here though it's less invention than variation, and there's an often disappointing distinction between the two.

Fan service as ouroborous, devouring itself endlessly. Director Shawn Levy has worked with his stars before, on Real Steel and Free Guy. He's also got a writing credit, along with Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Rhett Reese (Zombieland) and frequent co-writer Paul Wernick (GI Joe: Retaliation), and Zeb Wells (various TV, mostly Robot Chicken). There are some original ideas in there, but a lot more is deliberately derivative, arch only in the ironic sense and not in the architectural one, far from self-supporting.

In the supporting cast around Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman are plenty of other familiar faces. Matthew McFadyen appears to be channeling Richard E Grant about half the time, but those who've seen Loki would know why that was complicated. The volume of cameos makes some of those in the 1960s Bat-Man show look subtle, and some of the performances are only a novelty if you've never seen a movie not based on a comicbook. There are versions of characters based on action-figures rather than other iterations, lines of dialogue lifted wholesale from sources as diverse as Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 and Superbowl XXI.

There are references to a former capital of Powys Wenwynwyn and to the mummudrai scourge of Genosha. There's an attempt to make "baby-knife" a catch-phrase and nods to swordplay that was ancient even before Zatoichi took it up. Like in The Flash there are references to films you may have seen but also to films that were never made, a gambit that pays off for a certain kind of nerd but leaves everyone else wondering what to do with the hand they've been dealt.

The number of effects houses involved is inevitable. It's very hard to make this much use of metal skeletons and decomposing giants without them. Much like their dead-tree precedents there's a sense of artistic exploitation, while Liefeld might have had trouble with feet he could always meet deadlines. He was also in a position to get credit and get paid, but there's any number of creators whose contributions, like Dave Cockrum or Gil Kane, are masked. Having so many firms doing digital work isn't just about splitting the pie (before any fingers get involved) but seems more intent on harvesting as many production tax credits than anything else.

Within fandoms there's a strong collector impulse, and this needn't just be merchandise and the like but facts. Establishing by precedent and assertion who would win in a fight between this character and another, or another character and this one, or this character and an alternate version of that character or that character and an alternate version of this one. That count of "dresses in red, is self-conflicted both inside and outside his head" would be three were it not for the Back To The Future references that aren't in Across The Spider-Verse. Marty McFly's adventures are in a film that is so old that the 30 years in the future it travels to are themselves almost a decade in the past. The first MCU film was 16 years ago, and while I'm sure Jon Favreau was more than happy to have a truck full of money driven up to his house you'd hope he'd get to do a bit more than this with his time.

If it seems I'm spending a lot of time talking about other work then that's in part because Deadpool & Wolverine spends so much of its time doing the same. In as much as there's a plot it's a threat that's external that gives an opportunity to resolve an internal conflict. There are some fights and a bit of betrayal and then an ending, and the biggest surprise was seeing behind the scenes interviews and bloopers from Reynolds' and Jackman's first appearances as these characters. One of the striking things is how distorted expectations of leading man physiques have become, the popped-veins are a product of razor-thin margins on hydration and body-fat that would be concerning on folk have that age. When they were half that age that wasn't the fashion, but onions on the belt (or lots of pockets) have been replaced by short sleeves and shorn shirts and so here we are.

The 15 age-rating is well tested by gratuitous language and violence, and one suspects it's only the framing in jokiness that gets it a downgrade from 18. That's a consistently adolescent sensibility, 'adult' like bookstores, not literature. The ludicrous cocktail of violence and sesqui-entendres has some capacity to entertain but it eventually becomes stale. References to various forms of non-consensual sexual activity don't feel like boundary-breaking transgressions but a mainstream (and often callous) sensibility that feels old-fashioned. Its closest analogues are as much animated as some of these jokes are re-animated. What was at one point bold and thrusting now just feels like it should peter out. Deadpool & Wolverine is more of the same, and while some might feel that a generous portion others will find it hard to swallow.