Deadpool & Wolverine

 

    Like Oppenheimer, I was really looking forward to this movie, but I'm going to say it in the first sentence: it wasn't that good. I've always loved the character of Deadpool -- at least the way Ryan Reynolds plays him. Of course, the humor and the fourth wall breaks are always great but I also love his super power. I personally like superheroes who don't have really have that many super natural abilities. For example, I've never been a fan of Doctor Strange magic since I don't really find his fight scenes that enjoyable to watch. There's just so much CGI and I personally like action sequences that are more grounded and real. In fact, I believe that action sequences shouldn't even have CGI and should be as practical as possible. Unlike Doctor Strange, Deadpool's only super natural ability, his healing factor, is not needed for the majority of a fight scene so we get great John Wick style action.

    Now I feel like the most important of Deadpool is his story as Wade Wilson. This is what added depth to Deadpool as a character, but I felt l that this depth is one of the main things missing from the movie. In the first Deadpool, we get to see the story of how Wade falls in love but struggles to maintain his relationship as things start falling apart. In the second film, we get to see Wade struggling with the loss of his lover and also how he handles his responsibility to help Russell. These are two stories of a real human being, which I don't think this movie contains. In classic Marvel fashion, they just jam packed this movie with a bunch of slow motion fight scenes and cameos thinking that it's going to make everyone excited, but I felt like they just heavily overused these cheap tactics. They basically flattened Deadpool into a guy who just cracks jokes and fights -- this is not interesting at all. If you think about it, Deadpool's mask is on in a majority of the movie.

    I think the main problem with Marvel is that they're not releasing movies with actually good stories. I feel like Marvel (or more realistically Disney) thinks that people go to Marvel movies for good looking action sequences and cameos. This is typical big studio behavior where they try to prioritize profit over quality -- it's much easier to dump a bunch of money into VFX rather than invest in actually good writers. I feel the main reason the Infinity Saga was so successful is because the characters actually had depth and there was a good story. Cameos can help with this, but the I didn't really feel like cameos in this movie helped enhance the story of the MCU. This is mainly because of the multiverse.

    The whole reason introducing Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War was so cool was that there was only one that we expected Spider-Man to interacting with the other MCU character. We already loved the character of Spider-Man and we now wanted to see how he would interact with the other characters we loved. However, when Blade is revealed in Deadpool & Wolverine there's nothing special about him (other than the fact that the original actor is playing the character). With Spider-Man, we knew that we were only getting one but with Blade, there are an infinite of them. This Blade just is some multiversal variant that doesn't really matter for the main story line. In fact, we know the actual Blade is being played by a totally different actor. The same thing happened when Reed Richards is introduced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was cool to see a Fantastic Four member (and also John Krasinski) in the MCU, but we knew this Reed Richards didn't really matter. My main point is these multiversal cameos are fun to be surprised by a few times but it starts getting old after a lot of cameos since you start realizing that that these characters don't matter.

    I'm pretty sure this movie was suppose to revive Marvel since these past few years haven't been great. Unfortunately, I don't think this movie can do it. I know lots of people who loved watching the movie, but their main reasons were superficial elements like humor and VFX. This movie needed to lay down the path other Marvel movies which I don't really think it did. Basically, the only MCU related thing in this movie was the TVA, so I still don't know how Deadpool is going to be incorporated into the rest of the MCU. For example, how is an R rated character going to interact with PG-13 characters? Marvel used to be super good at giving just the right amount of information to get you excited about what's next for Marvel. For example in the Iron Man post-credit scene, Nick Fury that Tony Stark is not the only superhero and how there's something called the Avengers initiative. This is perfect since now your excited to see who the other superheroes are and how Iron Man fits in. On the other hand, in Deadpool & Wolverine, we don't get any information like this, and now I don't know what be excited for with Deadpool. I was really hoping for a cool post-credit scene but instead, we just got a joke.

    If you've noticed, so far, I've only talked about the MCU aspect of this movie, but the Fox universe was also supposed to be an equally important part of this movie. After all, this is a Deadpool and Wolverine movie. However, I've intentionally steered away from this since if I'm being honest, I didn't really watch a lot of the Fox universe movies. I think I've watched like two or three X-Men movies, but I didn't really get into them. I definitely didn't know who Elektra, Blade, or Gambit were before this movie, so I definitely was a little confused when people in the theater started cheering when these characters came into frame. Since I wouldn't say I was a fan of the Fox movies, I can't really commentate on this aspect of the movie. I know some people who absolutely loved seeing these characters played by the original actors, but that definitely wasn't me.

    So now, the natural question is what was the film good at? I can't answer this question without talking about the opening sequence. I genuinely think this is the best opening sequence I've seen in a Marvel movie. I personally really like funny and goofy opening sequences, like in Guardians the Galaxy Vol. 2. If you think about it, the opening sequence in Deadpool and Wolverine was really similar, cutting between someone dancing to someone fighting, but I feel like I laughed way more when watching this movie. (I think it was the dancing). Speaking of funny stuff, the humor, as usual for Deadpool (or even Ryan Reynolds) movies, was great. I especially loved the jokes Disney and Fox since this was definitely unique. So overall, I would say this movie was fun to watch but it's definitely not as good as the movies in the Infinity Saga.