Deadpool & Wolverine shows an MCU nearing a sad endgame
The MCU is back, but with an R-rated makeover in the self-referential cameo-fest Deadpool & Wolverine. Is it enough to save Marvel?
Stop the MCU, I want to get off
“Marvel is so stupid,” says Ryan Reynolds in one of the first lines of dialogue we hear in Deadpool & Wolverine.1 “Welcome to the MCU, you’re joining at a bit of a low point,” he quips later. An hour or so then goes by before we’re told that the Multiverse Saga has been “miss after miss”. It’s a bizarre approach for a film so transparently built on fandom erections — there’s even a gag about nerds grabbing their “special sock” — to spend quite so much of its running time telling us it exists within a completely terrible, moribund excuse for a franchise. Nobody, it seems, hates the MCU more than Marvel.
This, then, is the moment fans have been waiting for. Just 12 months after Chris Pratt delivered the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first F-bomb, Deadpool is here to lacerate throats, joke about pegging, and call people four-letter epithets beginning with just about every letter of the alphabet. Any fears that Disney would cut Deadpool’s balls from between his legs — or sew his mouth shut again — are long gone. However, they have still ruined just about everything that made the character work.
On the big screen, at least, Deadpool has built his success on being on the outside of the tent pissing in. Now, he’s inside the thing and covered in his own piss.
We meet Wade Wilson desperate to become an Avenger, but ultimately he’s scooped up by one of the TVA’s sinister suits (Matthew Macfadyen2) and told his reality is collapsing without its “anchor being” — the Wolverine who died at the end of 2017’s brilliant Logan. Wade’s answer is simply to go timeline-hopping and scoop up another Logan (Hugh Jackman), though this just gets both heroes zapped off to The Void, presided over by mind-controlling psycho Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).
That’s about as much of a plot as there is because this is barely even recognisable as a movie. It’s essentially a shuffle function slideshow of nerdy pub chats, loosely dragged along by the perfunctory machinations of Macfadyen and Corrin’s utterly thankless roles. The self-referential gags and dick jokes come thick and fast, though don’t clog the movie up nearly as much as its cameos do. The idea of a buddy movie between the excitable Deadpool and morose Wolverine is a fascinating one — I wrote about the polarity principle with regards to Longlegs the other week — but director Shawn Levy and the five credited screenwriters can’t resist getting bogged down in turning audiences into that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme.
The entire multiverse era of the MCU has already been damaged by this newfound propensity to wind up a perpetual carousel of empty-headed cameos.3 For every cameo that lands — and there are one or two — there are three that simply don’t justify grinding the entire film to a halt. The final act requires us to believe in an emotional bond between the two title characters, but it falls flat because we’ve spent so long watching them spit meta one-liners at that-guy-from-that-thing. It doesn’t help that nearly all of these scenes are shot against spoiler-resistant and visually drab CGI landscapes.
When Deadpool is just allowed to be Deadpool rather than a newbie trying too hard to join in with in-jokes in the office Slack, the film almost works. Reynolds still understands this character better than anyone else on the planet and Jackman is a game straight man for his silly shtick. But they’re both wading through the sludge of a movie that won’t stop nudging you to remember things from decades ago like a $200m Peter Kay routine.
One aspect of the movie in which you might expect it to thrive is the action. This is Marvel’s mega-budget approach to fight scenes, but with two guys who wield more blades than the kitchen section at Ikea. There’s certainly plenty of hacky-slashy chaos going on, now soaked in buckets of arterial spray and body bits — one grotesque kill feels like the sort of thing you’d expect to see on The Boys — thanks to that R-rating. But it’s made very clear from the start that Deadpool and Wolverine are immortal, so the various scenes in which they tear chunks out of each other just feel like absolutely nothing, despite the amount of claret sloshing around.
It’s yet another example of the way Deadpool & Wolverine can’t stop telling you how different and new it is, in lieu of actually doing those different and new things. Its structure is every bit as superhero-by-spreadsheet as any recent Marvel outing, with those aforementioned action sequences crowbarred in every 20 minutes or so whether the plot requires them or not. The film just isn’t funny or entertaining enough to be as aimless and meandering as it is.
At one point, I picked up my pen and wrote four words down in my notebook that I think sum up the experience of watching Deadpool & Wolverine about as well as I possibly can: “THIS IS JUST STUFF”. Plot is always happening, actors are always walking in from 20-year-old box office calamities, Reynolds is always quipping, Jackman is always growling, blood is always flowing. But it doesn’t feel like there’s any sort of plan.
This isn’t really a movie. It’s just a lame Reddit thread upvoted by Kevin Feige. Surely, after more than 15 years of cultural dominance, Marvel can do better than that.
Deadpool & Wolverine is in UK cinemas now.
The Tate Debate
We’re all very aware these days of the idea of echo chambers. But I never feel the walls of my own echo chamber as strongly as when I’m watching a documentary like Doom Scroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet. I think Andrew Tate is evil and a malign influence on the world, but I thought that before watching even a second of this documentary. And I am almost 100% sure that my opinions will be shared by every single person watching. The people who need to see a doc like Doom Scroll are exactly the people who will never watch it.
It doesn’t help that Liz Mermin’s doc is a bit of a clumsy one. It unfolds across two timelines, with one thread exploring the rise of Andrew Tate from kickboxer to Big Brother contestant to de facto final boss of the manosphere. The other half of the movie explores the evolution of the major social media platforms and the way their algorithms have fuelled Tate and his ilk since at least the days of Gamergate. Mermin, unfortunately, fails to draw strong enough connective tissue between her two strands.
The problem here is that it’s all very surface-level, with the platform-based half of the story an achingly familiar tale told already in much greater detail by a thousand docs and newspaper longreads. We know that algorithms twist every facet of our lives and we know that the big tech companies have always pursued money and engagement over user safety. Tell us something new.
It’s the story of Tate that provides the selling point for this doc but, again, it’s drawn in broad brush strokes. The doc caters for those with no prior knowledge, which is great, but lacks any of the meat that an engaged audience might want. It sort of points at Tate and yells the word “algorithms” without ever interrogating exactly what makes him so uniquely appealing. Why Tate and not one of the million other manosphere grifters? Doom Scroll doesn’t really have an answer.
And this is the core issue. Doom Scroll isn’t the sort of doc that stands any chance of changing minds or moving the needle away from Tate’s increasingly chilling impact on young men. It’s a slick enough piece of filmmaking that blasts amiably through the story, but it can only preach to the converted, allowing Tate’s acolytes to dismiss it easily as “MSM feminist propaganda”.
If you’re entirely new to the noxious concept of Tate, then Doom Scroll is a decent enough primer. But for those who have already spent the last few years dwelling in the dark shadow of the algorithms, it’s a sadly insubstantial watch.
Doom Scroll is available to stream in the UK via Sky Documentaries and NOW.
Echoes from a totally different world
The remote village of El Eco sits four hours from Mexico City and almost 3,000 metres above sea level. Its population is just over 100 people. Tatiana Huezo’s patient, elegiac documentary The Echo shines a spotlight on three vibrant families living in the quiet isolation of this rural world — almost a different planet to the bright lights and pollution of the capital.
Life moves at a slower pace for these people and Huezo focuses on the unique struggles of a society essentially separate from the mainstream. One young girl is tasked with caring full-time for her ailing grandmother, while another is told she can’t embrace her passion for riding horses because it’s not something girls do. Indeed, Huezo highlights how old-fashioned and regressive this village can be, with one father remarking to his son that “men don’t wash dishes; that’s what women are for”.
Given this backdrop, it’s interesting to watch the children of El Eco slightly pushing back against the old order of things. There’s a push-and-pull between the age-old farming world in which a woman says she gave up singing songs because she had too many household chores to do and the new order of young women wanting to race horses and serve in the military.
The Echo presents its world without judgement, offering an impartial eye that refuses to editorialise. Sometimes, this delivers stark power, such as in the scene of the entire village united in grief as part of a funeral procession. Often, though, it leaves the viewer to dispassionately observe slice-of-life interactions that often skew a little too mundane. This is a movie that rewards patient audiences, but represents something of a challenge to others.
When Huezo finds a moment that hits, though, The Echo’s quiet intelligence reveals itself. It’s not a commentary on different ways of life, but an illustration of how diverse and multi-faceted our world still is, despite how often it feels we’re all trapped within a social media-driven hegemony (see above). This is a world in which sobering discussions about selling enough sheep meat to buy food for your family exist just minutes away from discussing whether prickly pears on the roof are an adequate defence mechanism against child-stealing witches.
As a peek into a world very different from our own, there’s a lot of intrigue to be found in The Echo. But you do have to be willing and patient enough to embrace the mundanity, and I confess to finding my own patience a little strained at times.
The Echo is in UK cinemas now.
Trailer of the Week: Terrifier 3
When Damien Leone followed up his cult slasher Terrifier with a sequel in 2022, it caught fire off the back of tabloid reports about its extreme gore. Art the Clown became a modern horror icon and eyes turned to what Leone might do next. It turns out that the answer is to take Christmas and make it very bloody indeed.
We got our first look at Terrifier 3 this week and there’s plenty of blood sloshing around, as well as some horrific-looking supernatural images. Art the Clown making a snow angel with blood will really stick with me. Deck the halls with… well, it’s probably better not to say.
Terrifier 3 is in UK cinemas from 11th October.
Next week: With blockbuster season dominating cinemas, it’s a quiet week at the multiplex. Here’s hoping there’s something worth talking about…
It’s telling that, in a franchise built on irreverence and meta silliness, this is the most obviously focus-grouped title in the history of superhero storytelling. Very much a moniker chosen by an SEO expert rather than anyone wanting to have any sort of fun. Deadpool’s in it. Wolverine’s in it. Give us your cash.
The movie is such an MCU love-in that it can’t even muster a single joke about Succession.
The nadir of this remains John Krasinski’s appearance in the Doctor Strange sequel. Even if you’ve watched every MCU movie and know them intimately, that cameo still makes no sense unless you’re innately familiar with online casting rumours. Indulgent whiffle of the worst kind.
Yup. Couldn’t agree more with your Deadpool review.