The quipping and meta-referencing have started even before the Marvel Studios ident is fully on the screen. Deadpool & Wolverine carries on in this vein, hitting Peak Ryan Reynolds at about the halfway mark, before realising it’s also meant to be a superhero movie, stops waving its hands around airily and finally balls them into fists.
It also gets a bit dull at that point too, or less fun. Up till then this is a very funny film, making jokes about cocaine use, pegging, the shocking treatment that Fox meted out to Wolverine, how Disney saved the day, how Deadpool is “Marvel Jesus” and on and on and on it goes.
Don’t even think of starting here. You need to have seen Deadpool 1 and 2. A working knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is also helpful, and the world of the X-Men. But at least director Shawn Levy and the team of writers (Reynolds himself included) have the good grace to get us up to speed on Wolverine, who died heroically the last time we saw him.
And so, in order for Deadpool and Wolverine to team up, a bit of alternaverse plotting has been worked up, involving a Time Variance Authority, a rogue actor called Mr Paradox (played by Matthew Macfadyen, also very funny, giving us about 75 per cent of his peevish Succession character), something called The Sacred Timeline, and a search by Deadpool to find from the many, many alterna-Wolverines one who will fit the bill and help him save his bit of the metaverse from early extinction.
The one he eventually settles on is a drunk, pissy failure, but this Wolverine is buff enough to pass muster and a lot better than the others. And so this makeshift duo head off into a landscape that owes quite a lot to Mad Max (cue quip from Deadpool about IP copyright infringement) where they assemble a subs bench superhero team – Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), Gambit (Channing Tatum) and Laura (Dafne Keen) – and try to evade annihilation at the hands of Emma Corrin’s bald arch villain Cassandra Nova (the wicked sister of X-Men boss Professor Charles Xavier, it turns out).
Big breath. There is quite a lot of it but the plot is largely an irrelevance. It’s really about the jokes, for the first half at least, which revolve around the unbearable smugness of the ADHD Deadpool and his combative relationship with perma-scowling Wolverine. The tone is adolescent-humour-meets-dad-joke, with many references to buttholes and the bromance which Deadpool teases Wolverine with the entire time. “Are you two going to fight or fuck?” a side character asks at one point. That is about the size of it.
Shit-talking, very bad language, men getting stabbed in the balls, a spectacularly ugly dog, a re-run of that joke from the first Deadpool, in which Deadpool’s head is used to repeatedly change the radio station in the car where he and Wolverine are fighting.
The fighting. It’s good. It’s funny. At one point there’s a big fight sequence set to Madonna’s Like a Prayer. There are cameos by Henry Cavill and Chris Evans, neither of whom is who you expect them to be. There is music on the soundtrack by Huey Lewis, AC/DC, Patsy Cline, Avril Lavigne and Chris De Burgh. At one point Deadpool is talking to Wolverine’s skeleton and addresses it as “Hugh”. At another he threatens some villains with the suggestion that Wolverine is about to break into songs from The Music Man (the show Jackman was appearing in on stage before bulking up to return to the role he thought he’d left behind). At several points Jackman corpses, breaking into a smile at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and Reynolds’s relentlessly fey delivery.
I’m just writing a list, I know, but that is the nature of this beast. Coherent it ain’t. Funny it is. I laughed regularly and deeply and possibly a bit guiltily. If you maxed out on Ryan Ryenolds a long time ago, you’ll probably hate it.
Deadpool & Wolverine – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
