Time to catch up on some of this year’s releases with a big one—I must confess, superhero fatigue has been real for me. Avengers Endgame was all well and good, but after a culmination of an entire decade-odd of films, I felt more or less done, with a lot more now needed to grab me than just the promise of CG fights in tights and capes. Marvel seems by many accounts to be just meandering around now, with its first outright flops in a while—while Sony does…erm…something or another with its comic properties, perhaps the equivalent of trying to bang its head on a wall in the hope that the resultant cracks make something coherent.
But here comes something I actually didn’t mind heading out with some pals to the theater for—because in many ways it was trying something different. I enjoyed the first Deadpool film, crassness and all, though I admit that much of the second one pretty much vacated my brain (there was a recurring character here I didn’t even remember from that one). Here though, we not only have one more ride for poor ageing Hugh Jackman as everyone’s favorite clawed X-Man, but a very meta look and blunt satire at the all-encompassing webs of media acquisitions, franchises, and timelines…all as delivered by a sweary Ryan Reynolds wearing red pyjamas!
Indeed, here we have Reynolds as the mouthy mercenary now undergoing a bit of existential crisis, looking at now only his entry into the behemoth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but more than that—as he himself puts it, striving to be more ‘than a one-note foul-mouthed clown’. It’s not long before he gets recruited by an inter dimensional agency of vagueness involving in pruning timelines—no guesses as to what this is aiming at. And for rather convoluted reasons that the movie wisely doesn’t dwell too much on, it becomes apparent that what he needs to do is retrieve the one claw-toting person he rather wouldn’t.
The plot may be drawing on the same old multiverse stuff that everyone seems to be doing the last few years, but the key thing here is that’s something a little different between the ultraviolence and blood-drenched jokes. Here, at least someone’s asking about all the homogenization that comes with everything being assimilated under one big umbrella—and, while at the end it’s all rather inevitable, there’s at least something here to give closure to all those Fox studios films that, let’s face it, the Marvel projects probably wouldn’t exist without. You probably know by now—there’s cameos galore, including from shall we saw someone who once so sagely remarked about the practicalities of skating uphill, to one that I really would not have ever expected (anyone remember that 2003 Daredevil had a spinoff? Yeah, that’s what I mean!)
And yes, Jackman is back after what I thought was some pretty good closure to the character in 2017’s Logan, though that is addressed in the only way this one could. As the film itself puts it, he’ll probably be doing it until he’s 90 at this point.
That’s probably the best way to put it—the film knows it’s being dragged into the bigger whole for better or worse, and like some of the characters do, face inevitability while at least trying to cap it all of the best they can. As for the jokes? It’s what you want, it’s what you get, I smirked at some of them, though a few fights near the end went on perhaps a tad too long, but overall, it was a definite step up from the second one in memorability.
And of course, what happens now? This put a good enough cap on the character as they could, but with all those dollars, will that be the end? Will Reynolds appear in the next Avengers, commentating on whether or not they’ll match the next Avatar film for cash? Hell I don’t know, but if a chuckle can be had, at least that’ll be something, regardless of where these comic movies end up in. I suppose amid churning reboots and indecisive crossovers from anyone else, Ryan can be the one constant fans can all rely on!
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