Deadpool and Wolverine

Team-up movies are the bro version of enemies-to-lovers lesbian romances. You put two lads with very different personalities together. They fight a lot. And they end up sharing a beer and slapping each other on the back in a just good friends really sort of way.

If ever there was a team-up movie crying out to be made, it is Deadpool and Wolverine. That’s because both of these characters have powers of regeneration. They can’t be killed. And that means that they can fight to the death, over and over again, and still get back up for more. It is bromance heaven.

Of course Wolverine is actually dead, at least as far as the MCU is concerned. Indeed, he had one of the most beautifully choreographed deaths in movie history. Everyone seems to agree that Logan was a great movie, and a perfect send-off for an iconic character. But, as we know, no one in comics stays dead for very long. And now we have the Multiverse, so no one need stay dead for more than a few seconds. There is always another reality in which they are still alive and can be fetched, rabbit-like, from the script-writer’s hat.

The plot of the movie is fairly basic, if somewhat unusual for Deadpool. At last Wade Wilson gets to save the world, rather than just himself. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, that’s unusual because Wade Wilson is an arsehole. No, let me correct that. Wade Wilson is to arseholes what black holes are to kitchen sink waste disposal units. That’s the thing about the Deadpool franchise. You have a character who is utterly insufferable, but no matter how many times you kill him, with however much extreme prejudice, he just keeps coming back.

Logan, in contrast, is an actual hero. He might be grumpy and insolent, often drunk, and prone to ridiculous levels of violence, but beneath it all is the traditional heart of gold that won’t let people down if they really need him. Even someone like Wade Wilson.

My favourite part of the film is where Logan gets to say to Wade:

“I mean, you are a ridiculous, immature, half-wit moron. I have never met a sadder, more attention-starved jabbering little prick in my entire life, and that says a lot because I’ve been alive for more than 200 fucking years.”

That’s just before they spend ten minutes or so ripping each other to pieces and coming back to life again.

Every superhero movie needs a villain, and in this film the role is taken by Cassandra Nova, Charles Xavier’s evil twin sister. She’s magnificently portrayed by Emma Corrin who, I note, despite having played the super-feminine Princess Diana in The Crown, uses non-binary pronouns. I think Diana would have liked that.

There are guest appearances by other X-Men characters, but as this is a Multiverse story few of them are the Earth 616 versions of them. And indeed the whole movie takes place in a different timeline to the main MCU, and therefore can be conveniently ignored for continuity purposes. There’s a strange, red-skinned version of Nightcrawler whom I rather liked. Apparently that’s Azazel, who used to be Kurt’s father but now isn’t because X-Men continuity is insanely complicated.

The film also features guest appearances from Elektra and Blade (both played by the original actors). It has a newly grown up Dafne Keen reprising her role as Laura/X-23, which is lovely, and the worst piece of casting I have seen in the MCU. I gather from the ‘Making Of’ documentary that Channing Tatum has always wanted to play Gambit, and indeed has been desperately trying to interest Hollywood in a Gambit movie. It is lovely that Ryan Reynolds gave him the chance to do it, but he looks like a muscle-bound thug stuffed into a too-small Gambit costume. It is sad.

The film is, of course, supposed to be a comedy. I laughed twice. Once was when I saw how they had styled Cassandra’s base. That was seriously imaginative. The other was when the Deadpool Corps turned up. This is a small army of different version of Deadpool from different parts of the Multiverse. So we have Nicepool, who is irritating in a very different way, Ladypool, Kidpool, Samuraipool, Dogpool, Cowboypool and so on.

There is also a character whose costume bears a Welsh flag, so obviously he is Welshpool. That probably means nothing to you, but there is a town in North Wales called Trallwng, which the English call Welshpool. It has a lovely steam railway, which Kevin and I visited over the summer, and a splendid National Trust property. It is quite small as towns go, but it is very near Wrecsam. Consequently many of the inhabitants will be fans of Wrecsam football club, which Ryan Reynolds owns. Of course by the time you have explained the joke it is no longer funny.

I’m sure that lots of people will have found Deadpool and Wolverine funnier than I did. But I did find it clever. I loved the way they had used existing parts of MCU continuity to make the team-up happen. And I appreciated the way in which they poked fun at Marvel, Disney, Fox and the whole Hollywood studio system along the way. Deadpool movies don’t so much break the fourth wall as take a wrecking ball to it and reduce it to rubble. I am occasionally amazed at what they get away with.

Also this was a movie that was partly about Logan. Hugh Jackman was magnificent as always. He gets to wear the yellow suit at last, which will make the fans happy. And it worked. I cried.