Deadpool & Wolverine, 2024.
Directed by Shawn Levy.
Starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, and Matthew Macfadyen.
SYNOPSIS:
Deadpool & Wolverine arrives in the digital format, a couple weeks ahead of its October 22 release on DVD (people still buy those?), Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD. The movie, and the bonus features found in the digital edition, are middle-of-the-road for me, but your mileage may vary.
I love it when my kids surpass me in anything. In this case, it’s my daughter’s enormous love for Marvel, both the comic books and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). They (making sure I use the proper pronoun here) are a veritable fount of information about Marvel in my household. It’s very impressive.
See, I read some X-Men way back when, but I dropped off the comic book bandwagon over 20 years ago and have no idea where to even begin when I walk into a comic shop and see the titles on shelves these days. (Most of my buying tends to be those cool reprints of old classic issues.)
And I never really went all-in when it came to Marvel Comics, aside from dipping my toe in some Spider-Man titles and a few other franchises. (I did follow the Thanos Infinity Gauntlet storyline back in the day, too.) So every time I watch an MCU movie or a show on Disney+, I don’t have the insight into the characters and how their stories relate to ones from the comic books, like my daughter and other like-minded fans do.
Yeah, that’s true of pretty much all the MCU content except the X-Men, which brings me to the subject of this review, Deadpool & Wolverine. Deadpool is a character I didn’t really know a lot about, I’m ashamed to admit, before seeing his first two movies, while Wolverine is, of course, a guy I’m pretty familiar with. I have fond memories of that Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X storyline in Marvel Comics Presents back in the 90s, among other things.
But you don’t really need to know a lot about Deadpool before watching his movies, and I was happy to go along for the ride with both of them. They’re a big batch of crazy, kinetic, fourth-wall-bursting fun, and I also love Once Upon a Deadpool, a PG-13 version of the second movie that turns it into a very funny The Princess Bride parody, complete with a grown-up Fred Savage.
Aaaand this is the part of the review where I have to admit, much to my daughter’s dismay, that I thought Deadpool & Wolverine was okay (not awful, but not great either). The premise of teaming up those two characters and bringing Hugh Jackman back was a brilliant idea, and I love the fact that both of those characters are now officially part of the MCU, but, yeah, this movie didn’t quite work for me.
My main issue is that the whole multiverse thing feels overdone these days. I know, that’s the thrust of the current batch of movies and shows, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of them so far, but I would have appreciated Deadpool & Wolverine more if it went in a different direction. Maybe it could have more directly set up the introduction of the X-Men into the MCU.
But if it worked for you, that’s great. Life’s too short to get all worked up about this stuff, and the great thing about the MCU is that if you didn’t like one of the movies or shows, more entries are just around the corner. (True, that has its downside in the form of superhero fatigue from so many movies and shows to keep up with.)
I’m writing about this movie now because Disney sent me a code to redeem for a digital copy (they won’t send me physical copies of movies anymore, but that’s something else that I don’t need to get all worked up about.) It’s the same digital copy that you can buy now, complete with a batch of extras, rather than wait for a code to be included with the Blu-ray and 4K Ultra HD discs.
Hey, I should spin this as: I get to check out all the home video extras before a lot of other people do! Okay, yeah, I can’t redeem my digital copy before it’s widely available to everyone else, but, you know, have fun waiting for your discs, physical media people! (I swear I’m one of those people. I own hundreds of movies on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD. I’m just having some fun with this part of the review because, you know, the whole snarky Deadpool thing.)
So, how about those extras? Like the movie, they’re okay, and, to be fair, does every MCU movie need a mountain of bonus features? Way back when in the days of monolithic superhero movies, in-depth extras made sense because, for example, we only had a new Superman or Batman movie every few years, and each one was An Event.
These days, with multiple Marvel and DC movies each year (although my understanding is that the pace of releases, at least on the MCU side, is going to slow down), and characters popping in and out of various stories, no single film is an event unto itself. Well, yeah, aside from the big ones like the Avengers movies that concluded the Thanos saga, but other than that, these movies are mostly chapters in larger storylines.
As a result, I came into Deadpool & Wolverine with an expectation that the studio would provide your typical home video extras package: a commentary track, a few featurettes, and some deleted scenes. And they delivered on that expectation, although they also tossed in a gag reel and something called Deadpool’s Fun Sack, both of which are as funny as you might expect.
The commentary track serves up director Shawn Levy and star Ryan Reynolds chatting over the film. It has the mood of sitting down with both of them and BSing about the movie, which is perfect for it.
The deleted scenes are two minutes of little bits excised from the film, and the featurettes total 31 minutes and cover:
• Making the oner (if you’ve seen the movie, you know the shot being referenced)
• An examination of the design of the TVA offices shown here (note that it’s a different TVA office from the one in the Loki show)
• An overview of the smattering of characters who show up in the Void (I love the fact that so many actors are happy to return to the MCU even for a minor role)
• How and why Wolverine was brought into the film and Hugh Jackman’s return to the character
And that’s it. No trailer to round out the digital platter, but you can’t have everything. Plus, you can probably just watch it on YouTube anyway.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
