Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the odd supercouple in Deadpool & Wolverine. Photo / Getty Images
Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the odd supercouple in Deadpool & Wolverine. Photo / Getty Images
By the time of his grim send-off in Logan in 2017, Hugh Jackman as the X-Men’s Wolverine had already set a record for one guy playing the same superhero in so many movies. But in the age of the comic-book movie multiverse, it seems, his adamantium bones cannot rest easy.
At the start of this, they’ve actually been dug up by Deadpool, the X-Men-adjacent anti-hero whose main superpower is breaking the fourth wall with his potty mouth.
Played again by Ryan Reynolds, also one of the writers and amusingly annoying as ever, he uses Wolverine’s skeletal remains as weapons in the first of the movie’s many impressively gory melees, a tastelessly, violently funny prelude for a movie that starts as it means to go on.
It turns out to be the funniest Marvel flick in recent memory, easily the most irreverent, if also one of the most story-starved. Still, it’s quite the satire, skewering the tired idea of the “Marvel Cinematic Universe” almost as much as its odd supercouple are impaling anyone who gets in their way. Though Reynolds’s in-jokes about the studio politics behind the film become a running gag that runs out of puff.
Via some multiverse trickery by the quantum bureaucracy “Time Variance Authority” (see Loki TV series), Deadpool finds an intact flesh and bone Wolverine, with Jackman donning the yellow spandex jumpsuit his character wore in the comics but was regarded as too silly for the X-Men movies. Not here.
No, nothing is too silly or too self-aware or on the nose in this – one joke even references Jackman’s real-life divorce. It even brings back a few superheroes from wherever it is that lesser superhero franchises go to die. Actually, it shows exactly where – “The Void”, a purgatory ruled by Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin, The Crown’s first Lady Di), a figure from X-Men mythology who at least gives this a decent villain who undercuts the wackiness. So, too, does Jackman’s performance as the whiskery human cutlery drawer. It’s quite the curtain call for the old fella.
