Can the ailing Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise be redeemed with a metric tonne of frantically self-aware comedy? Now that fewer and fewer people care, can this summer tent pole persuade them to have a laugh at what they used to care about? Can the superhero genre get back on top with a gag riot from Ryan Reynolds’s wisecracking crime fighter Deadpool in an odd-couple action bromance with Hugh Jackman’s wizened Wolverine as his straight man, the careworn spirit of seriousness?
Kind of. Deadpool was always the satiric turn – but this is a movie which more or less orders the audience to stop taking any of the proceedings seriously, shattering the fourth wall into a million pieces with material about nerds saving their “special sock” for particular fight scenes. It cheerfully (if sheepishly) makes mock of the MCU’s cosmic timeline shenanigans which permit characters to be brought back to life and even does loads of very tiresome corporate in-jokes about Disney taking over Fox, presumably on the basis that civilians care as much about this as the Hollywood combatants. Reynolds is often funny, sometimes very funny, periodically entirely unbearable, often a weird and interesting mix of the three.
His Deadpool, now merely Wade Wilson, is a depressed car dealer who applies without success to join the Avengers. But he is secretly recruited by the creepy Briton Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen) who wants him to spearhead a secret project to mercy-kill this particular fading universe within the multiverse, and Deadpool, despite the attractions of being the heroically sacrificial “Marvel Jesus”, angrily refuses and recruits grumpy old Wolverine from the dead to save our world from this plan.
But for their pains they are imprisoned in a place called the void, whose plagiaristic resemblance to the Mad Max movies is cheekily waved away with pre-emptive jokes. Here they encounter a terrifying villain: Cassandra Nova, the bald twin sister of Charles Xavier, played by Emma Corrin. I expected Deadpool to call her something like Mean Lady Di ripping off Tilda Swinton’s look from Dr Strange. Deadpool and Wolverine are quarrelling, occasionally fist fighting but basically they are a team. Wilson’s best pal Peter is likably played by Rob Delaney.
And yes, there are a lot of laughs here as this film crashes along with plenty of juke-box slams to keep blood-sugar content high, although the humorous aspect is oddly cancelled at the very end with a deadly serious memory-reel over the final credits sentimentally celebrating Hugh Jackman’s best moments within the X-Men series.
Basically, Deadpool is quite right – he is Marvel Jesus, he is the guy elevated from the ranks here to be the heroic saviour, the wacky character who is going to make sense of the whole MCU business by repositioning it as gag material and keep the whole thing ticking over, perhaps until the MCU in its original fundamentally serious mode comes back into box office fashion. It’s amusing and exhausting.