55028: Deadpool & Wolverine

As a kid, I loved playing with Star Wars toys. And I was lucky, growing up with a big brother who also loved them as much as I did, so we effectively had twice as many starships, Storm Troopers, and the like. I have core, core memories of creating action-packed scenarios with those little hunks of plastic with my brother. We spent afternoons mashing together all three movies (this was the 80s) and the occasional Transformer or GI Joe into increasingly outlandish stories, unconstrained by intellectual property laws or insane concepts like "subtlety" or "less is more." And that's exactly the feeling I had, watching Deadpool & Wolverine. The spirit of play and possibility suffuses the movie, even if Deadpool's schtick starts to show its age in this third outing.

Without going too deep into the plot (and why would you want to?), Deadpool & Wolverine dives into the multiverse, the conceit that is driving the newest phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and uses it as a metaphor for the end of 20th Century Studio's own comic book movie universe. It's not a subtle metaphor, either. It gets flogged like a horse that's really into flogging, beaten again and again through wacky asides, cameos, fourth wall breaks, more cameos, stunt casting, meta jokes, and somehow even more cameos. But Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool, duh) and Hugh Jackman (Wolverine, and apparently also Mumm-Ra the Ever Living) gamely follow the fan service breadcrumbs through a mostly coherent story that, if you strip it down to its nuts and bolts, isn't too far removed from 48 Hours or any mismatched-partners buddy cop movie from the 80s or 90s.

Look, this may not be news to you, but I'll say it anyway: the shortcut to making a great comic book movies is to sew superhero costumes onto an existing genre story and keep it moving. Think about Ant-Man, the quintessential heist movie, and how much fun it was. Then think about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which was pretty much a sloppy mess of an action movie, straining under the weight of so much lore and foreshadowing that it felt like homework.

Kudos to the writers, Rhett Reese, Ryan Reynolds, and Paul Wernick, for focusing on the actual movie at hand, and making all the winks and Easter eggs icing on the narrative cake instead of load-bearing pillars in the house of story. Even more kudos to director Shawn Levy (30 Rock's Scottie Shofar) and editors Shane Reid and Dean Zimmerman for keeping the whole thing moving at a steady clip, while still recognizing the important moments that warrant dance numbers.

There's not much else to say about Deadpool & Wolverine, other than it's fun, it takes some lovely, catty jabs at film studios, and there's a fight between the titular heroes in a Honda Odyssey that is a pretty obvious stand-in for hate sex.

There is also an overriding theme of forgiveness and second chances, mixed in with all the amazing cameos. Wolverine and Deadpool are both given the chance to be the heroes they should have been, and forgiven for their many failures, just as the filmmakers forgive themselves and the late, great 20th Century Studio for any cinematic missteps it made in bringing decades of Marvel stories to (varying degrees of) life.

In a way, Deadpool & Wolverine is an olive branch extended to the entire roster of 20th Century's Marvel films. There were some gems, some utter dogs, some problematic filmmakers, and some great memories in those films. And while Deadpool is generally associated with a pathological lack of seriousness and/or respect, this movie closes the book on its universe gently, and with no shortage of reverence and good-natured ribbing. All told, this movie really has far more heart than seems possible or warranted, but there it is. Like the day when an awkward tween packs away their Star Wars figures, Deadpool & Wolverine is a coda to a larger story. It's a story I've enjoyed, mostly, and I'm glad we got to take it.