GIADF
Not A Mod
- Aug 17, 2024
- 1,380
- 1,565
Useless Thread MCMV: Dig the f*** in
- Thread starter John Price
- Start date
- Status
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
forgot my happy cow pills again.
can't eat pizza for dinner.
can't eat pizza for dinner.
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Tom Grossi is a comedian and content creator who traveled to all 30 NFL stadiums in 30 days and raised $1 million for charity.
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
None of the jokes were funny.
The movie was obnoxious and pissing me off so I stopped watching.
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
but you need to finish it to understand the plot and the ramifications for the MCU
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
I thought the movie was unfunny and grating before I even got to the relentless and insultingly-cheap fan service that I also won't like because I'm not one of those "I clapped when I saw the thing I know" morons that is clearly the movie's target audience.
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
"the ramifications of the MCU"
Yeah, a steeper downhill trajectory because that low-brow hunk of shit made a billion dollars, which means the clueless execs are going to take the worst aspects of it and integrate them into the laughably stale Marvel Formula™.
Yeah, a steeper downhill trajectory because that low-brow hunk of shit made a billion dollars, which means the clueless execs are going to take the worst aspects of it and integrate them into the laughably stale Marvel Formula™.
GIADF
Not A Mod
- Aug 17, 2024
- 1,380
- 1,565
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
Sega Dreamcast
party like it's 1999
This person wrote an entire Bible of a review, bah gawd.
The desecration of a sacred corpse.
Deadpool and Wolverine (the italics are back, so you know it’s serious) is a colossal f***ing bummer. If I wanted to get really severe about it, I’d say it’s one of, if not the, most vacuous films I’ve ever seen, a 250 million dollar cavity bereft of meaning or inspiration that exists for no reason other than to satiate a consumer culture that’s been primed to accept nothing but “superhero nostalgia extravaganzas”, and is in desperate need of a studio propaganda puff piece to assure us all that yes, while the looming threat to the art form may be obvious, Disney sees it too, and even thinks it’s funny, so you should too. It’s not that I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s Deadpool. We’ve all already been primed to think of his fourth-wall-shattering irreverence as beyond critique; how can something that so ruthlessly makes all the criticisms you could possibly make before you have the chance to make them ever be meaningfully critiqued?
Pretty easily actually, because it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Deadpool’s self-awareness is as superficial as ever, and one of the only things this new one maintains from the prior two films beyond the swearing and violence is the embarrassingly ineffective dichotomy between a metatextual sense of humor that begs not to be taken seriously and a schmaltzy, sentimental, self-serious emotional core. In no way are Deadpool or his movies beyond critique, and never have they ever deserved it more than now. Deadpool and Wolverine is meaningless dreck, and it doesn’t even have the good graces to not be f***ing annoying and boring while it’s at it.
First, cursory gesturing towards positives, since I’m only giving this a two star rating: I laughed at maybe one joke in twenty. Some of those are genuinely pretty good though. The action as a whole is mostly really mediocre but every now and again it transcends that label into the realm of “ok.” As I’m writing this it’s occurring to me that this might be a star and a half actually, cause I’m out; sometimes I laughed and I had *some* fun.
Most of the ways in which Deadpool and Wolverine are bad are really uninteresting to even think about, let alone articulate: it looks like shit, its humor’s obnoxious, it doesn’t make any sense, yada yada. That’s mostly pretty apparent so I’m not going to get into it that much, aside from maybe some brief ramblings about the plot. What I’m more interested in is trying to parse what, if anything, Deadpool and Wolverine is about, because it is *loaded* with signifiers that suggest meaning without actually lending it any.
We start out shockingly promising. After a first act where Deadpool’s a retired loser whose now ex girlfriend is just hanging around waiting for him to get his life together (more on this later maybe probably not this movie’s really misogynistic), he’s inexplicably kidnapped by the Loki time cops from Loki (only genuinely really funny joke in the movie is a crack about how ridiculous it is that the plot is predicted on the f***ing Loki show) and taken to meet Mathew Macfadyen in the time police precinct. Macfadyen, by the way, brings kind of an unpleasant energy by virtue of how clear it is that he’s better than this and doesn’t really want to be there. He’s fine, but he doesn’t get to do anything really fun and you can tell there’s never anything going on behind the eyes except thoughts of lunch. Anyways, Macfadyen provides the film with a glimmer of hope that it may actually be reckoning with a theme! He introduces Wade to the idea of an “anchor figure” a person so special that the very existence of the universe hinges on them being alive; once they die, their universe is doomed to collapse within a few thousand years (this idea of a supreme ubermensch who also happens to be a costumed superhero is never brought up again despite being the fulcrum point of the plot. Alan Moore is becoming dangerously vindicated). Turns out Wolverine was that anchor figure, and since he died in the decaying pre-apocalypse of Logan’s 2029, that means that Deadpool’s mostly normal world of 2024 is imminently f***ed.
I have genuinely no explanation for this discretion, I’d dismiss it out of hand, but the film does not stop reminding you of it, and it’s impossible to unravel. Most generous read is that the events of Logan actually happened ten years earlier than they said they did in the movie, and everybody just rapidly aged, and Logan forgot that Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are still totally fine…. I hate to do this CinemaSins garbage but like… what, am I going to talk about the way that it looks?
Anyways, Macfadyen tells Wade that he intends to prematurely prune his dying timeline because he thinks waiting for it to die naturally would be… boring? They specifically never press this point presumably so as not to frame the guy who wants Deadpool to be in the MCU as being in any way profit-motivated. He offers Wade a chance to hop universes, permanently joining the MCU while leaving his friends behind to die in the dust (why he gives Deadpool this offer is bafflingly also never explained, last time I mention this I swear (dishonestly)). This is, genuinely, a compelling thematic baseline, albeit a blunt one. Our villain is the personification of the Disney-Fox buyout. Macfadyen wants to assimilate what general audiences resonated with from the Fox movies, and wipe away the messier components of the art for the sake of maintaining brand consistency. It’s a plot line that positions our hero as ideologically opposed to the Walt Disney Corporation’s ruthless franchising, one that verges on genuine transgression from a character who up to this point has only ever postured as an iconoclast — so naturally it’s swiftly abandoned and never brought up again.
Macfadyen is immediately written out, and Deadpool and our hastily-introduced new Wolverine spend the remainder of the movie in a literal IP dumping ground, a barren, colourless wasteland inhabited by all the casualties of the Fox buyout. This, theoretically, could be a breeding ground for some meaningful meta commentary. The film’s cold open features Deadpool literally digging up Wolverine’s grave from the end of Logan and beating a wave of time cops to death with his skeleton. On paper, there’s a sort of “kill your Gods” chic about the film’s approach to Logan, and it’s similar mockery of Fantastic Four and the X-Men movies. The question of whether superhero films are truly “art” as we understand it has hung heavy over the entire industry these past five years, and an MCU film which asks the audience to loosen their grips on the embedded iconography of these films could be sincerely challenging to an audience that’s come to perceive any threat to their artistic sanctity as sacrilege.
But Deadpool and Wolverine isn’t interested in criticizing either the fervent veneration of superhero movies or how capital interests render art disposable. In fact, it’s really only interested in affirming both those sentiments. Despite garbing itself as a scathing takedown of bad Fox superhero movies, the movie can barely get off a few jokes about them before shifting gears to focus on how cool they are. After the cold open, Logan is treated with nothing short of worship, lavished as it’s being actively desecrated. Dafne Keen’s Laura returns from that film in the second act (again, inexplicably), allowing her to cheer new-Wolverine up with a rousing speech about how cool the old one was. At the end of the film, she’s plucked back into the main Deadpool universe, where she’s happy to have a new happier, healthier Wolverine to replace the old gross one who up and died on her. I don’t subscribe to the notion that Logan is a whole lot more than a solid genre riff, but it’s indescribably disheartening to see what meaning it does have sucked out with a straw while it’s being gushed over by every character in the movie.
The other franchises (the soon-to-be-replaced Fantastic Four aside) are played similarly, shockingly, straight. Wesley Snipes’s Blade returns to…. get a crack off about Blade: Trinity? Make a joke about how Ali’s Blade isn’t ever coming out? Have a cool action scene? Even Jennifer Garner’s infamously panned Elektra comes back and is played…. mostly seriously? There’s a half-hearted joke about Affleck’s DareDevil being dead but otherwise, the audience is expected to cheer for her, and she’s never treated with anything other than reverence. They make jokes about Tatum’s ill-fated Gambit, but even he gets to be cool? “Cameo culture” has achieved conceptual singularity so quickly that it already feels like old hat, an easy punching bag for jokes that even Marvel itself got in on in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, a movie Deadpool and Wolverine’s second act feels like one big, embarrassing apology for. Two years ago, fans demanded Nick Cage Ghost Rider and Thomas Jane Punisher show up in a Portals recreation to outdo Endgame, and what they got was a few quick cheers for Black Bolt and then an immediate, visceral mutilation sequence for the entire cameo squad. This Sam Raimi Doctor Strange movie, which is otherwise similarly messy and misguided and kind of empty, has more bite in it than this so-called superhero satire, which revels in how f***ing Sick it is to get domestic abuser Wesley Snipes back in (a really shitty looking version of) his classic costume, mugging to the camera about ice skating up hill once more.
This third act turn from lampooning to glorifying certainly isn’t here to suggest that there is in fact merit to art produced outside of the Disney enterprise though. These returning faces have all been stripped of the distinctive styles that defined their films, reduced to a familiar MCU aesthetic and formal style, assimilating them in everything but Canon. The closest thing Wade has to a central conflict is his drive to attain the spirit needed to become an Avenger, something he uncritically achieves in the final act. Despite the initial framing of Macfadyen’s assimilationist executive as the antagonist, the film ultimately affirms his view that brand integration is the ultimate goal of commercial art.
In the final act, the film’s vacuity takes center stage. Deadpool and Wolverine return to the universe of the prior two films to stop Macfadyen’s evil Time Ripper from prematurely destroying the universe. Before they can though, the film’s actual villain, Charles Xavier’s secret evil sister, Casandra Nova, who I haven’t mentioned to this point because what could I possibly say, appears and takes over the Time Ripper, intent on using it to… destroy the multiverse or something, I don’t know, she kind of mumbles that part and it’s not important. Before Deadpool and Wolverine can stop HER now (since Macfadyen’s once again been rendered benign), The Deadpool Corps emerges from Nova’s portal. The Deadpool Corps, a group of multiversal Deadpools wandering around the void, was mentioned exactly one (1) time, in a completely superfluous earlier scene with the aforementioned hot Ryan Reynolds, but have otherwise not been in the movie in any capacity to this point. They are stupid and evil and want to kill Deadpool and Wolverine because they are stupid and evil. Deadpool and Wolverine instead kill them in a completely unintelligible one take that could genuinely put me to sleep. Then all the Deadpools regenerate and stop trying to kill Deadpool and Wolverine because Peter from Deadpool 2 shows up and tells them to stop and they all respect him. In case it wasn’t clear, this is the climax of the movie.
What am I supposed to do with this?
This has to mean something. There must be some meaning to extract from this. This sequence undoubtedly cost more money than everyone who reads this review combined will ever see in our entire lives. There must be some kind of commentary, no matter how silly or on the nose, that this is supposed to provide. Is it about Deadpool becoming too popular? Too overexposed? Are there too many Deadpool knock-offs now? Like what?!? Hellboy (2019)????? Birds of Prey????????? Thank Christ somebody finally took Birds of Prey to task!!!!!!!!!
The obvious answer is the one Wade gives us right before the fighting starts: this is a criticism of the Multiverse fad, another easy crack about how bad the MCU’s been lately, a bookend to the ill-fated “multiverse saga.” But this is not five minutes after the mostly-played-straight epic action sequence with Wesley Snipes Blade and Julia Garner Elektra slicing through the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from X-Men: The Last Stand. We just got a big multiverse send-up — and it was about how cool the multiverse is! Also, more importantly…. does Marvel even intend to give up the ghost on the Multiverse???????? Are they not hedging all their bets on *this* very movie to keep them afloat for the next year??????? Is Sony not pushing for a No Way Home follow-up in the same vein??????????? Are they not making Avengers: Secret Wars in three years????????????????? What is this supposed to be satirizing?????????? This is the climactic action set piece, sandwiched mere minutes between another big action set piece and the emotional climax, and it could have very easily been cut! The only thing that would need explaining is why Wolverine put his mask on off-screen! The film wastes its biggest moment on something entirely devoid of meaning!
The movie wraps up with a return to relative status quo, save for Wolverine and Laura, and more importantly, the nodding approval of the para-MCU time cop organization, a tonal microcosm of the film itself, which, despite posturing as a piss take, is desperate to conform to the sensibilities of the franchise it’s been thrust into. Levy’s having a little more fun behind the camera than most directors of these things get to, but the familiar, hegemonic MCU aesthetic shines through, and the film’s structure and narrative tone adheres to the MCU formula to a T. This creates an incredibly bizarre problem for a film that is supposedly destined to make a billion dollars to have: this is a movie for no one.
Say what you will about the first two Deadpool movies, they did have clear audiences. The first film was a raunchy date movie, a sort of shock jock valentine’s alternative masquerading as a sex comedy. Budgetary constraints kept the superhero stuff to a minimum, forcing the film to actually center its romance, while letting the irreverent humour and graphic violence exist mostly on the periphery until the third act. It was a date night alternative for young adult couples that teens would sneak into. Deadpool 2 centered the action aspect while completely jettisoning the romance (and with it, the female lead, again, these movies are really misogynistic). This certainly sanded down the series’s generic distinctiveness, but the film mostly skewed closer towards the adult-oriented action genre (getting Leitch post-John Wick and Atomic Blonde but pre-Hobbes and Shaw and Bullet Train definitely helped lend it some credence there) than conventional superhero fare, still giving it an obvious audience of older teens and young adults wanting to laugh while watching people die.
Deadpool and Wolverine is a kids movie you can’t take your kids to. Colourful action figures smashing together in the haziest outline of a Saturday morning cartoon plot with no style, no texture, and nothing going on under the hood. Everything about it aside from the blood and every other word out of the lead’s mouth told me that I was watching a movie mostly aimed at 9-14 year olds, but the only people in the theater cheering at Wolverine’s CGI mask were men in their 30s! I’m not saying all this to position myself as “too mature” for a silly action comedy or whatever, but rather to position Deadpool and Wolverine as the apotheosis of cultural infantilization. Over the last half century, but especially the past 15 years, we have seen the age margin for who corporations believe mass art should appeal to shrink more and more. We hit critical mass in the 2010s, when films aimed at a middle school demographic, that perfect PG-13, became the dominant model for the industry. Now we’ve become so collectively disposed to films of that tone that we demand that even our theoretically adult entertainment adhere to those sensibilities. Children’s art and entertainment is now repackaged to not just appeal to adults, but to also shut out children. This film asks you to tap into your inner child as you leave your child behind, begs you not to think, let alone feel, while you indulge the same textureless mush you’ve been force fed since you could walk, and hopes you’re fooled by its abrasive new branding.
Deadpool and Wolverine has no grand thematic ambitions. It’s contradictory by design. Reynolds himself put out a public statement weeks before the premiere confessing as much: the movie is dumb. It has only one goal, beyond the abstract intention of securing a future for the MCU: giving the people what they want. And what Marvel Studios imagines the people want is empty, meaningless noise. I hope to God they’re wrong.
For those wondering why I went opening night to see a movie I had no interest in seeing: my mom really wanted to see it. She laughed at far more of the jokes than I did, and seeing her smile made me much happier than anything happening on screen did
The desecration of a sacred corpse.
Deadpool and Wolverine (the italics are back, so you know it’s serious) is a colossal f***ing bummer. If I wanted to get really severe about it, I’d say it’s one of, if not the, most vacuous films I’ve ever seen, a 250 million dollar cavity bereft of meaning or inspiration that exists for no reason other than to satiate a consumer culture that’s been primed to accept nothing but “superhero nostalgia extravaganzas”, and is in desperate need of a studio propaganda puff piece to assure us all that yes, while the looming threat to the art form may be obvious, Disney sees it too, and even thinks it’s funny, so you should too. It’s not that I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s Deadpool. We’ve all already been primed to think of his fourth-wall-shattering irreverence as beyond critique; how can something that so ruthlessly makes all the criticisms you could possibly make before you have the chance to make them ever be meaningfully critiqued?
Pretty easily actually, because it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Deadpool’s self-awareness is as superficial as ever, and one of the only things this new one maintains from the prior two films beyond the swearing and violence is the embarrassingly ineffective dichotomy between a metatextual sense of humor that begs not to be taken seriously and a schmaltzy, sentimental, self-serious emotional core. In no way are Deadpool or his movies beyond critique, and never have they ever deserved it more than now. Deadpool and Wolverine is meaningless dreck, and it doesn’t even have the good graces to not be f***ing annoying and boring while it’s at it.
First, cursory gesturing towards positives, since I’m only giving this a two star rating: I laughed at maybe one joke in twenty. Some of those are genuinely pretty good though. The action as a whole is mostly really mediocre but every now and again it transcends that label into the realm of “ok.” As I’m writing this it’s occurring to me that this might be a star and a half actually, cause I’m out; sometimes I laughed and I had *some* fun.
Most of the ways in which Deadpool and Wolverine are bad are really uninteresting to even think about, let alone articulate: it looks like shit, its humor’s obnoxious, it doesn’t make any sense, yada yada. That’s mostly pretty apparent so I’m not going to get into it that much, aside from maybe some brief ramblings about the plot. What I’m more interested in is trying to parse what, if anything, Deadpool and Wolverine is about, because it is *loaded* with signifiers that suggest meaning without actually lending it any.
We start out shockingly promising. After a first act where Deadpool’s a retired loser whose now ex girlfriend is just hanging around waiting for him to get his life together (more on this later maybe probably not this movie’s really misogynistic), he’s inexplicably kidnapped by the Loki time cops from Loki (only genuinely really funny joke in the movie is a crack about how ridiculous it is that the plot is predicted on the f***ing Loki show) and taken to meet Mathew Macfadyen in the time police precinct. Macfadyen, by the way, brings kind of an unpleasant energy by virtue of how clear it is that he’s better than this and doesn’t really want to be there. He’s fine, but he doesn’t get to do anything really fun and you can tell there’s never anything going on behind the eyes except thoughts of lunch. Anyways, Macfadyen provides the film with a glimmer of hope that it may actually be reckoning with a theme! He introduces Wade to the idea of an “anchor figure” a person so special that the very existence of the universe hinges on them being alive; once they die, their universe is doomed to collapse within a few thousand years (this idea of a supreme ubermensch who also happens to be a costumed superhero is never brought up again despite being the fulcrum point of the plot. Alan Moore is becoming dangerously vindicated). Turns out Wolverine was that anchor figure, and since he died in the decaying pre-apocalypse of Logan’s 2029, that means that Deadpool’s mostly normal world of 2024 is imminently f***ed.
I have genuinely no explanation for this discretion, I’d dismiss it out of hand, but the film does not stop reminding you of it, and it’s impossible to unravel. Most generous read is that the events of Logan actually happened ten years earlier than they said they did in the movie, and everybody just rapidly aged, and Logan forgot that Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead are still totally fine…. I hate to do this CinemaSins garbage but like… what, am I going to talk about the way that it looks?
Anyways, Macfadyen tells Wade that he intends to prematurely prune his dying timeline because he thinks waiting for it to die naturally would be… boring? They specifically never press this point presumably so as not to frame the guy who wants Deadpool to be in the MCU as being in any way profit-motivated. He offers Wade a chance to hop universes, permanently joining the MCU while leaving his friends behind to die in the dust (why he gives Deadpool this offer is bafflingly also never explained, last time I mention this I swear (dishonestly)). This is, genuinely, a compelling thematic baseline, albeit a blunt one. Our villain is the personification of the Disney-Fox buyout. Macfadyen wants to assimilate what general audiences resonated with from the Fox movies, and wipe away the messier components of the art for the sake of maintaining brand consistency. It’s a plot line that positions our hero as ideologically opposed to the Walt Disney Corporation’s ruthless franchising, one that verges on genuine transgression from a character who up to this point has only ever postured as an iconoclast — so naturally it’s swiftly abandoned and never brought up again.
Macfadyen is immediately written out, and Deadpool and our hastily-introduced new Wolverine spend the remainder of the movie in a literal IP dumping ground, a barren, colourless wasteland inhabited by all the casualties of the Fox buyout. This, theoretically, could be a breeding ground for some meaningful meta commentary. The film’s cold open features Deadpool literally digging up Wolverine’s grave from the end of Logan and beating a wave of time cops to death with his skeleton. On paper, there’s a sort of “kill your Gods” chic about the film’s approach to Logan, and it’s similar mockery of Fantastic Four and the X-Men movies. The question of whether superhero films are truly “art” as we understand it has hung heavy over the entire industry these past five years, and an MCU film which asks the audience to loosen their grips on the embedded iconography of these films could be sincerely challenging to an audience that’s come to perceive any threat to their artistic sanctity as sacrilege.
But Deadpool and Wolverine isn’t interested in criticizing either the fervent veneration of superhero movies or how capital interests render art disposable. In fact, it’s really only interested in affirming both those sentiments. Despite garbing itself as a scathing takedown of bad Fox superhero movies, the movie can barely get off a few jokes about them before shifting gears to focus on how cool they are. After the cold open, Logan is treated with nothing short of worship, lavished as it’s being actively desecrated. Dafne Keen’s Laura returns from that film in the second act (again, inexplicably), allowing her to cheer new-Wolverine up with a rousing speech about how cool the old one was. At the end of the film, she’s plucked back into the main Deadpool universe, where she’s happy to have a new happier, healthier Wolverine to replace the old gross one who up and died on her. I don’t subscribe to the notion that Logan is a whole lot more than a solid genre riff, but it’s indescribably disheartening to see what meaning it does have sucked out with a straw while it’s being gushed over by every character in the movie.
The other franchises (the soon-to-be-replaced Fantastic Four aside) are played similarly, shockingly, straight. Wesley Snipes’s Blade returns to…. get a crack off about Blade: Trinity? Make a joke about how Ali’s Blade isn’t ever coming out? Have a cool action scene? Even Jennifer Garner’s infamously panned Elektra comes back and is played…. mostly seriously? There’s a half-hearted joke about Affleck’s DareDevil being dead but otherwise, the audience is expected to cheer for her, and she’s never treated with anything other than reverence. They make jokes about Tatum’s ill-fated Gambit, but even he gets to be cool? “Cameo culture” has achieved conceptual singularity so quickly that it already feels like old hat, an easy punching bag for jokes that even Marvel itself got in on in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, a movie Deadpool and Wolverine’s second act feels like one big, embarrassing apology for. Two years ago, fans demanded Nick Cage Ghost Rider and Thomas Jane Punisher show up in a Portals recreation to outdo Endgame, and what they got was a few quick cheers for Black Bolt and then an immediate, visceral mutilation sequence for the entire cameo squad. This Sam Raimi Doctor Strange movie, which is otherwise similarly messy and misguided and kind of empty, has more bite in it than this so-called superhero satire, which revels in how f***ing Sick it is to get domestic abuser Wesley Snipes back in (a really shitty looking version of) his classic costume, mugging to the camera about ice skating up hill once more.
This third act turn from lampooning to glorifying certainly isn’t here to suggest that there is in fact merit to art produced outside of the Disney enterprise though. These returning faces have all been stripped of the distinctive styles that defined their films, reduced to a familiar MCU aesthetic and formal style, assimilating them in everything but Canon. The closest thing Wade has to a central conflict is his drive to attain the spirit needed to become an Avenger, something he uncritically achieves in the final act. Despite the initial framing of Macfadyen’s assimilationist executive as the antagonist, the film ultimately affirms his view that brand integration is the ultimate goal of commercial art.
In the final act, the film’s vacuity takes center stage. Deadpool and Wolverine return to the universe of the prior two films to stop Macfadyen’s evil Time Ripper from prematurely destroying the universe. Before they can though, the film’s actual villain, Charles Xavier’s secret evil sister, Casandra Nova, who I haven’t mentioned to this point because what could I possibly say, appears and takes over the Time Ripper, intent on using it to… destroy the multiverse or something, I don’t know, she kind of mumbles that part and it’s not important. Before Deadpool and Wolverine can stop HER now (since Macfadyen’s once again been rendered benign), The Deadpool Corps emerges from Nova’s portal. The Deadpool Corps, a group of multiversal Deadpools wandering around the void, was mentioned exactly one (1) time, in a completely superfluous earlier scene with the aforementioned hot Ryan Reynolds, but have otherwise not been in the movie in any capacity to this point. They are stupid and evil and want to kill Deadpool and Wolverine because they are stupid and evil. Deadpool and Wolverine instead kill them in a completely unintelligible one take that could genuinely put me to sleep. Then all the Deadpools regenerate and stop trying to kill Deadpool and Wolverine because Peter from Deadpool 2 shows up and tells them to stop and they all respect him. In case it wasn’t clear, this is the climax of the movie.
What am I supposed to do with this?
This has to mean something. There must be some meaning to extract from this. This sequence undoubtedly cost more money than everyone who reads this review combined will ever see in our entire lives. There must be some kind of commentary, no matter how silly or on the nose, that this is supposed to provide. Is it about Deadpool becoming too popular? Too overexposed? Are there too many Deadpool knock-offs now? Like what?!? Hellboy (2019)????? Birds of Prey????????? Thank Christ somebody finally took Birds of Prey to task!!!!!!!!!
The obvious answer is the one Wade gives us right before the fighting starts: this is a criticism of the Multiverse fad, another easy crack about how bad the MCU’s been lately, a bookend to the ill-fated “multiverse saga.” But this is not five minutes after the mostly-played-straight epic action sequence with Wesley Snipes Blade and Julia Garner Elektra slicing through the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from X-Men: The Last Stand. We just got a big multiverse send-up — and it was about how cool the multiverse is! Also, more importantly…. does Marvel even intend to give up the ghost on the Multiverse???????? Are they not hedging all their bets on *this* very movie to keep them afloat for the next year??????? Is Sony not pushing for a No Way Home follow-up in the same vein??????????? Are they not making Avengers: Secret Wars in three years????????????????? What is this supposed to be satirizing?????????? This is the climactic action set piece, sandwiched mere minutes between another big action set piece and the emotional climax, and it could have very easily been cut! The only thing that would need explaining is why Wolverine put his mask on off-screen! The film wastes its biggest moment on something entirely devoid of meaning!
The movie wraps up with a return to relative status quo, save for Wolverine and Laura, and more importantly, the nodding approval of the para-MCU time cop organization, a tonal microcosm of the film itself, which, despite posturing as a piss take, is desperate to conform to the sensibilities of the franchise it’s been thrust into. Levy’s having a little more fun behind the camera than most directors of these things get to, but the familiar, hegemonic MCU aesthetic shines through, and the film’s structure and narrative tone adheres to the MCU formula to a T. This creates an incredibly bizarre problem for a film that is supposedly destined to make a billion dollars to have: this is a movie for no one.
Say what you will about the first two Deadpool movies, they did have clear audiences. The first film was a raunchy date movie, a sort of shock jock valentine’s alternative masquerading as a sex comedy. Budgetary constraints kept the superhero stuff to a minimum, forcing the film to actually center its romance, while letting the irreverent humour and graphic violence exist mostly on the periphery until the third act. It was a date night alternative for young adult couples that teens would sneak into. Deadpool 2 centered the action aspect while completely jettisoning the romance (and with it, the female lead, again, these movies are really misogynistic). This certainly sanded down the series’s generic distinctiveness, but the film mostly skewed closer towards the adult-oriented action genre (getting Leitch post-John Wick and Atomic Blonde but pre-Hobbes and Shaw and Bullet Train definitely helped lend it some credence there) than conventional superhero fare, still giving it an obvious audience of older teens and young adults wanting to laugh while watching people die.
Deadpool and Wolverine is a kids movie you can’t take your kids to. Colourful action figures smashing together in the haziest outline of a Saturday morning cartoon plot with no style, no texture, and nothing going on under the hood. Everything about it aside from the blood and every other word out of the lead’s mouth told me that I was watching a movie mostly aimed at 9-14 year olds, but the only people in the theater cheering at Wolverine’s CGI mask were men in their 30s! I’m not saying all this to position myself as “too mature” for a silly action comedy or whatever, but rather to position Deadpool and Wolverine as the apotheosis of cultural infantilization. Over the last half century, but especially the past 15 years, we have seen the age margin for who corporations believe mass art should appeal to shrink more and more. We hit critical mass in the 2010s, when films aimed at a middle school demographic, that perfect PG-13, became the dominant model for the industry. Now we’ve become so collectively disposed to films of that tone that we demand that even our theoretically adult entertainment adhere to those sensibilities. Children’s art and entertainment is now repackaged to not just appeal to adults, but to also shut out children. This film asks you to tap into your inner child as you leave your child behind, begs you not to think, let alone feel, while you indulge the same textureless mush you’ve been force fed since you could walk, and hopes you’re fooled by its abrasive new branding.
Deadpool and Wolverine has no grand thematic ambitions. It’s contradictory by design. Reynolds himself put out a public statement weeks before the premiere confessing as much: the movie is dumb. It has only one goal, beyond the abstract intention of securing a future for the MCU: giving the people what they want. And what Marvel Studios imagines the people want is empty, meaningless noise. I hope to God they’re wrong.
For those wondering why I went opening night to see a movie I had no interest in seeing: my mom really wanted to see it. She laughed at far more of the jokes than I did, and seeing her smile made me much happier than anything happening on screen did
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
Just got home,car on the highway at 10 pm driving at 25 mph
bud move your ass
signaled and sped by lol
bud move your ass
signaled and sped by lol
John Price
Gang Gang
- Sep 19, 2008
- 384,969
- 30,510
PanthersPens62
Paul & Stanley
Hood Morning @MetalheadPenguinsFan !!!!!!! 
It's that time of the year again as we begin our annual post-win tradition:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIt's a Panthers win !!!!!!!!!
It's that time of the year again as we begin our annual post-win tradition:IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIt's a Panthers win !!!!!!!!!
I love how you now include me in this tradition.Hood Morning @MetalheadPenguinsFan !!!!!!!
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIt's a Panthers win !!!!!!!!!
Hood morning my cheerful chum.
Lol Bruins
- Status
