Caught in corporate creative freefall, the Marvel Cinematic Universe engages in a bit of branding self-sabotage in their Deadpool threequel. Be weary of self-inflicted cynicism from the colossal cinema conglomerates: when Disney say they are doing a bad job, they are still trying to manipulate an outcome. When they buy and gut 20th Century Fox and make it the punchline of the movie that allows them to make, they are shaping how they want you to think about how they did that.
The first way they’re doing that is by redirecting Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine from Logan (2017), which was such a sweet self-contained Western hero movie, and is now debased by the silly “Merc with a Mouth,” but — let’s also admit that’s funny. Retconning what’s come before is a bit of fun, even caught in the chaotic mess of the current state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Like Deadpool? Congrats. You’re getting more of it. How about Wolverine? Great! Hugh Jackman does some heavy lifting for the movie, playing on his persona inside and outside of the role of ‘Captain Canada’ and the interplay between Deadpool and Wolverine — this cynical fourth-wall breaking menace and jaded hero icon of old who has been dragged back from his character’s death, is tangible enough to produce some comedic results.
Caught in the cycle of middling Marvel movies from the last two phases — that neither fully met the expectations of critics and audiences — Deadpool & Wolverine wishes to self-exonerate the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie poises Deadpool as The Marvel Jesus, and he’s about to be crucified for the company’s sins. But you cannot nail yourself to the cross.
Real crews and filmmakers worked on the entries that the new Deadpool movie spits all over. It doesn’t have any decorum and this rebel-with-a-cause is factory-designed for this sort of cynical self-flagellation. Sorry, we made several movies leading into the Kang Saga and we’re not going to complete them. Let’s tee up what’s next — what came out of absorbing all of the Fox assets — X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
There are some pretty fun reveals here with pauses for applause. There’s a whole series of them like that, and it’s deeply uncomfortable, or deeply exciting, depending on how you feel about it. It’s fun, for sure, and so light, lithely moving between hyper-violence and awe-shucks terminally dead comedy.
Marvel movies now seem embedded with a certain kind of focus-tested fear and uncertainty. If they once boldly plotted a couple dozen movies at a time, they now yieldingly push toward grand gestures, tie in television shows not everyone has seen, and self-reflect on their own massive budget identity crisis. When the movies cost over a few hundred million, the cost of doing business is high, and to create anything out of risk, it’s dangerous. But the faux risk of the Deadpool movies — these half-hearted self-commentaries, betray the option to really do something new and novel with any of these characters.
We leave Deadpool & Wolverine, the year’s only Marvel movie, realizing there are not more because the plan has been blown up. And the misdirection of the recent slate of movies, plus last year’s strike, have accumulated and piled onto a really strange concoction of half-steps and nervous gestures towards the future. There are some fun setups here and the interplay between the title characters is perfectly fine. But we’re going to need a lot more than this to steer the ship back into Universe-building mode.
Marvel, uniquely exceptional at building out these multi-chaptered Universe-spanning movies, now seem to have entered the same rut as all of the competition that tried to emulate them over the last decade. The reason may very well be that instead of forging a path forward, now all they know how to do is emulate themselves.