Deadpool & Wolverine

Our Review

The rude middle finger the franchise needed after five years of drift. Deadpool & Wolverine pairs Ryan Reynolds’ merc with the mouth with Hugh Jackman’s Logan one more time, and the film’s premise is openly a corporate satire: Wade Wilson is recruited to save his dying timeline, which requires convincing the worst Wolverine in the multiverse to care again. The jokes come at four per second, and the hit rate is higher than the genre’s average.

The chemistry is the movie. Reynolds and Jackman have a bickering rhythm that plays like a decade long double act, and the film gives Jackman real pathos under the yellow suit: a Logan haunted by the X-Men he couldn’t save, wearing the costume he always refused. The opening, Deadpool desecrating Logan’s grave with the remains of the Fox universe’s prop department, sets the tonal contract honestly.

The cameos are the marketing’s engine and the film’s worst kept secret, a cluster of studio orphans who get their moment in the void, and the joy is real even when the film leans on it. Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova is a properly nasty telepath villain, all smiles and nerve endings. The finale is the standard CG energy column every Marvel film builds now, but the Deadpool Corp brawl and the Honda Odyssey car fight, two men dismembering each other to *NSYNC, are all time action comedy.

Our score: 7/10. Crude, self aware, and the most fun the MCU had all decade.