“Deadpool & Wolverine” Review: Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman Pack a Punch (and Punchlines) in Wild Marvel Epic

Their superhero bromance is stuffed with in-jokes, bruising battles, surprise celebrity appearances and classic pop songs

The latest Marvel blockbuster drags Hugh Jackman's baleful, snarling X-Men hero Wolverine — the name always suggests a synthetic fur used to line hoods and gloves — into the blithely foul-mouthed world of Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool.

Logan, as Wolverine is also known, turns out to be a surprisingly obliging guest, politely observant of his host’s house rules. In other words, Deadpool & Wolverine is Deadpool’s (and Reynolds') vehicle all the way.

If there isn't much going on beneath the film's funny but fussily textured surface of meta-humor, well, that's probably the point. Deadpool & Wolverine offers a rapid-fire, winkingly self-aware commentary on comic-book franchises (including X-Men) and Disney corporate might. As our heroes trade a volley of inside industry jokes, it's like a game of pickleball played by giants.

That should be enough irreverence for any superhero movie (let alone a Deadpool one), but there’s quite a bit more: Reynolds’ breezy, flip humor — so deft it could be called panache — is given absolutely free rein. There are at least three jokes about his marriage to actress Blake Lively, a throwaway line about Jackman’s Broadway revival of The Music Man — oh, just on and on and on. And good luck counting the easter eggs: The movie would give a basket-carrying bunny a hernia.

The effect of all this is entertainingly disorienting, as if nitrous oxide had been pumped into your IMAX theater. But it can also be fatiguing. Reynolds is a court jester who doesn’t know when to stop shaking the bells on his cap. Henry VIII would have had a simple, irrevocable fix for the problem.

Related: Is Deadpool & Wolverine OK for Kids? What Parents Should Know About the R-Rated Marvel Sequel

The movie starts brilliantly, at any rate. Deadpool exhumes the rotting remains of Wolverine — who died nobly, and one would have thought permanently, at the end of 2017’s Logan — and proceeds to joke around with the skeleton as if he were a frat-house Hamlet having a laugh with Yorick’s skull. In short order, however, he’s forced to fight off (that is, slaughter wholesale) a league of military assassins. He relieves them of their limbs and their heads, releasing great spurts of shiny crimson blood, all to the tune of *NSYNC's “Bye Bye Bye."

This stylish, hyperkinetic violence, repeated many times during the film, is generally more compelling than the gags — although it’s admittedly quite a kick to see Deadpool (via flashback) maskless and wearing a wig while trying to make a go of a career in car sales.

From there, though, the movie leaps into a storyline of such cardboard thinness it could be reconfigured as a shoebox: Deadpool hops around alternate universes, seeking a living Wolverine in the hope of preventing the collapse of every timeline in the cosmos. The job in sales was possibly more interesting. Maybe it even offered medical.

Deadpool does find his Wolverine, of course, but in a matter of minutes they've landed in a desolate, junk-strewn landscape called the Void. The place is run by the tyrannical Cassandra Nova (The Crown’s Emma Corrin), who looks like the late Sinead O’Connor with all the sad vulnerability siphoned off and away. She’s impressively frightening, and does awful things with her fingers — she can insert them deep into a human head as if she were gripping a bowling ball.

But the film is more interested in watching D and W settle into a bickering bromance that, at times, seems as teasingly homoerotic as the rivalry of Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in Challengers. 

In possibly the film’s best, wildest scene, they go mano a mano — a real bone-crunching, metal-crushing fight — in an old Honda Odyssey. (On the soundtrack: "You're the One That I Want" from Grease.) The morning finds them both sound asleep in the car's front seat, with Deadpool wrapped in his seatbelt in a way that suggests a bondage kink.

At this point the plot brings in some fun, familiar faces (no need to spoil things, other than to say that these are likable stars who clearly relish their roles). Your excitement at their arrival — or is it relief? — indicates just how little stake you’ve had in all that came before. Or that comes after, really, although Madonna's "Like a Prayer" adds a triumphant ironic blast at the very end. Too bad "La Isla Bonita" wasn't used during the scenes in the Void.

Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen plays the principal villain, Mr. Paradox. He's a truculent upper-middle manager who, unlike Deadpool, doesn’t realize that survival here depends on talking directly to the audience or knowing that Henry Cavill played Superman for another studio.

Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters now.

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