Blow Canada

“Get your special sock out, nerds—it’s gonna get good!” The wet-dream wait is over for blue-balled Marvel obsessives everywhere: Saskatchewan’s Merc with a Mouth is finally teaming up with Alberta’s 200-year-old adamanteum-clawed alcoholic rageaholic. Deadpool & Wolverine, a giddily ultraviolent scoop of supremely solipsistic fan service, serves up the long-awaited face-off between two superhuman mutants with regenerative healing factors, offering yuk-it-up bloody tussles that are endless roundelays of gratuitous meat-sack evisceration.

Casual Marvel viewers will be confused and repulsed; all the rest will revel in the infectious delight that the two stalwart franchise leads, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, take with each other and towards the lovingly profane send-up of their respective signature roles. Deadpool & Wolverine is Disney’s gonzo-porn MCU movie, a flashing red signal that the exhausted thrills of 33 previous comic-book action-adventure blockbusters eventually lead to the DVDA extremes of punch-line B-grade superhero cameos, graveyard desecration, pegging jokes, silly-shock thrill-kills, and baroque self-own put-downs. Family-friendly joy, meet the buoyant nihilism of teenage incels.

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Shawn Levy 
Written by: Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells, Shawn Levy
Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corin, Matthew Macfadyen
Running time: 128 mins

The past two Deadpool movies tried a bit harder to modulate the sassy satire with heartfelt earnestness, giving gnarly-skinned alter ego Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) more of a character arc that involved his true love Vanessa Carlysle (Morena Baccarin). Not so with this threequel, where—let’s face it—we really only want to watch the pair of title characters do their buddy-comedy shtick. “You two gonna fuck or fight?” says a surly bartender at one point. We sure don’t want to watch them do either with anyone else. So Vanessa gets sidelined in favor of battle royales like watching Wolverine slice and dice his way through 100 multiverse Deadpool variants. 

That’s right, the multiverse! Everyone’s favorite plot gimmick. “The multiverse is over!” yells Deadpool. “Move on.” Except, of course, the filmmakers don’t, because otherwise they can’t bring back James “Logan” Howett (Hugh Jackman), famously and fatally impaled in 2017. Enter the MCU’s ultimate deus ex machina, the Time Variance Authority, who snatch mild-mannered Wilson from his life of quiet desperation on Earth-10005 and give him the opportunity to “save the entire sacred timeline” of Earth-616—you know, the good one with all our favorite Marvel characters—which, in turn, will also allow Wilson to fulfill his secret wish to become a bona-fide member of the Avengers.

So the TVA send Wilson to their handsy in-house tailor for a brand-new, ass-spanking, butt-hugging crimson jumpsuit, complete with samurai swords and matching revolvers. Only catch: Wilson needs to say bye-bye-bye to his handful of loved ones on Earth-10005, since that timeline is the one with the dead Logan. And since Logan was that reality’s “Anchor Being”—I kept hearing Anchor Baby, but whatever—that timeline is slowly dying without him. And middle-management apparatchik Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, doing his weasel schtick) wants to hasten the timeline pruning with an unsanctioned Time Ripper that will destroy Earth-10005 in 72 hours.

Deadpool ends up fighting for Earth-10005, which means that he needs to find a replacement Wolverine to help him. And that requires a montage of wacky Wolverine variants scattered across the multiverse, a search that ends with Deadpool finding “the worst Wolverine,” a self-loathing, yellow-and-blue-suited variant too filled with shame and disgust to resist Deadpool’s entreaties. Except that Mr. Paradox zaps them into the trash heap, aka “the Void,” a metaphysical purgatorial collection of alternate pruned realities. Which is to say, it’s a huge netherworld laugh factory of toss-off jokes, obscure Marvel mentions, and overt MCU callbacks—specifically Loki Season 1 Episode 5, which Deadpool helpfully name-checks.

 Deadpool & Wolverine suffers from the too-muchness of supergroup Marvel movies, in which so many characters get so little screen time that everyone feels like they’re just doing a cameo. In many ways, Deadpool & Wolverine is a stealth Avengers movie, with an eye-popping array of super-sized special appearances and Easter eggs which vary from instantly forgettable to truly inspired. “Our worlds forgot about us,” says one discarded hero. “Or never heard about us,” says a Louisiana-accented mutant whose movie prospects notoriously got mired in development hell. 

As befits the previous installments, this new Deadpool flick breaks the Fourth Wall with clockwork regularity, sometimes gently tapping it and other times eagerly skull-fucking it—especially when it takes a victory lap about the improbable big-screen return of Weapon X’s most famous alum. “Fox killed him,” says Deadpool about Wolverine. “Disney brought him back. They’re going to make him do this until he’s 90.” Prep for shout-outs to Kevin Feige, Blake Lively, The Music Man, Scoutmaster Kevin, as well as a Hugh Jackman divorce joke, a Ben Affleck divorce joke, plus a striking visual nod to The Uncanny X-Men issue 251. 

“Pain teaches us who we are,” Deadpool says, quoting his roommate Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) in one of the more straight-faced moments of the film, when the script half-heartedly pays lip service to notions of heroism in the face of adversity. Then again, it also makes sure we know that Charles Xavier’s twin sister Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin) likes “flicking my bean to the Enya box set.” Gratuitous masturbation joke, anyone?

 Maybe the Deadpool films felt more subversive when they weren’t part of the Disney family. And now that the Mouse House has reintegrated Twentieth Century Fox’s Stan Lee IP into their stable, maybe the squeaky-clean studio feels obliged to show the world they can take a dirty joke and let Reynolds gleefully bite the hand that feeds. Or maybe the success of Amazon’s trashily profane hit show The Boys is making Disney feel the heat to stay relevant by pushing the edgy extremes of acceptable mainstream entertainment. Can’t wait to see our favorite Avengers ravish each other with strap-on dildos, put gimp balls in their mouths, and smashterbate in a corner. Wouldn’t that be a Marvel?