by What is a movie? It may sound like a silly question, but it’s one that’s been bouncing around in my head since I walked out. Deadpool and Wolverine Last Friday. Marvel’s quarter-wall, cameo-filled superhero sequel made a whopping $438.3m over its opening weekend – a record for an R-rated film. It feels in many ways like a watershed moment. But not a good one. If we are watching, as some critics have suggested, the death of the cinema happening before our eyes, it is in the form of a public execution.
There are many movies “worse” than Deadpool and Wolverine. Even within the purview of Marvel’s own conveyor belt oeuvre, last year’s review Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and 2022 Thor: Love and Thunder affairs that were much messier – structured chaotic and aesthetically rebarbative as long as Deadpool and Wolverine No. But Deadpool it somehow feels like the most cynical of the entire canon so far, the most heavenly spiritually and creatively. It’s a film about nothing – a film with no discernible purpose or artistic ambitions, other than to perpetuate its own corporate myth.
There are jokes about the Disney-Fox merger. Jokes about producer Kevin Feige. Jokes about the widespread disillusionment towards the Marvel franchise. About halfway through the film, the two leads of the same name (played by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, the latter exhuming – literally at one point – his famous X-Men character) meet a team of returning superheroes: Elektra Jennifer Garner, Blade Wesley Snipes , Johnny Storm Chris Evans (from Fantastic Four), Channing Tatum’s Gambit (not produced) and Dafne Keen’s mini-Wolverine from Location.
The film invites us to look at these descriptions. Meta-referential dialogue explains that these characters, seemingly stuck in some kind of “void” outside the Universe, are simply trying to get the endings they deserve. These “earned endings” actually appear to be less than 10 lines of dialogue each – in Snipes’ case, mostly just repeating phrases from the first three. Blade movies – before they all drive off to a desert wasteland and get hit by some sort of deadly CGI air monster. There is no attempt at characterization, no point behind the meta-crack. The insistence that audiences are clamoring for some reason to watch Reynolds’ Deadpool exchange vague interest with Tatum’s Gambit is heartening. Audiences did not love Blade because Snipes just showed up, stood there and hung phrases – he was part of a story, with real character, and stakes, and intelligence. Marvel certainly can’t see the difference – or, even worse, if it can see the difference it just chooses to ignore it.
It is said, too, that Reynolds spent much of it Deadpool and Wolverine trip press functionally retching towards vague of The Green Lanternhis 2011 critical mass of DC Comics, if it were Marvel and not DC, it would surely have been found back here as a “forgotten seam” along with the other dregs.
To be clear, Deadpool and Wolverine which is not the first film of its kind. In many ways, it is simply re-applying the lessons learned from 2021 Spider-Man: There’s No Way Home – a film that made waves (and over $2bn) with a glut of surprise cameos, giving Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and many others the opportunity to reprise their previous Spider-Man roles. But even that movie offered more in story and purpose than it was Deadpool and Wolverine. Garfield, Mag Uidhir and his colleagues were given the lowest bones of the character arc, to be played with as appropriate. (Garfield eventually took much more of the opportunity.)
If you will allow me to get a bit philosophical about things: how do we define what is and isn’t a film? Over the past two decades, Marvel has reshaped Hollywood in its own image, taking away some of the things that made filmmaking unique as an art form and moving it towards something more televised and serialized. We call Deadpool and Wolverine film because it is released in cinemas, and it is two hours long, but apart from these technical aspects, it shares almost nothing with a traditional blockbuster, when it comes to mind. The problem isn’t that he tells his story poorly – it’s that he has no interest in telling a story well at all. He is exclusively interested in the maintenance and consolidation of the Marvel brand, in its viability as a product and as an advertisement, a snake eating its own tail.
“Turn off your brain and enjoy it as it is,” now as the main mantra Deadpool defenders on social media. And of course, people are allowed to enjoy what they like. But many people certainly enjoy free-flowing cocaine; that doesn’t mean we should all go into production and distribution. If cinema begins to lose the sense that it should even function as a work of art – if only that bad art, but something else new and strange – then the tune, as it were, is up. Two Deadpool and Wolverine The future of cinema is what it looks like, it’s going to take more than a few plucky heroes to save it.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is in cinemas now
