Deadpool and Wolverine review: The action is 'a slog'

Despite a stellar media campaign, the odd-couple buddy team of Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman is occasionally wry and entertaining, but the action is "a slog".

Deadpool and Wolverine – which might more accurately have been called Deadpool and His Sidekick Wolverine – is sometimes very funny, at times a bit flat, and so filled with callbacks to other X-Men and Marvel movies that your head might explode, not in a good way.

Bringing together Ryan Reynolds' wise-cracking, motor-mouthed Deadpool and Hugh Jackman's fierce, metal-claw-fisted Wolverine, the movie fulfils the wishes of fans primed to love the simple fact that this long-teased film even exists. The clashing personalities of the satiric Deadpool and of Wolverine, the most dramatically serious of the X-Men, neatly create an odd-couple buddy team.

But here Deadpool, the irreverent superhero who recognises how ridiculous superheroes are, enters the self-serious Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, with its head-spinning timelines and multiverses. That change defeats the point of Deadpool.

The Deadpool character has always been, and continues to be, meta. Winking at the audience and breaking the fourth wall is his thing. There's also his damaged face, which he once described as looking like "pepperoni flatbread", his unprintable language and his self-healing powers, but mostly he's about winking at the camera.

No one ever winks in the MCU. And let's be honest: the multiverse can be tiresome. Deadpool (2016) and its sequel never sent anyone flying to a search engine for help sorting out its timelines and references, which Deadpool and Wolverine ultimately does.    

Reynolds almost single-handedly keeps this movie going, though, because Deadpool's meta comedy never lets up. It's there from the opening sequence when he sets out to prove that Wolverine, who definitely died and was buried in Logan (2017), is not really dead. Deadpool ends up dancing on his grave to 'N Sync's Bye Bye Bye, one of many pop songs that set a buoyant tone throughout. That is just the kind of goofy scene that made the earlier Deadpool movies breezy fun.

Deadpool also tells the audience, in the first of way too many unexplained references, that he didn't know if he'd get another movie after Disney bought Fox, kicking off a running joke. In short: the X-Men franchise, which included the Wolverine and Deadpool movies, belonged to 20th Century Fox. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is Disney. When Disney bought Fox in 2019, it created some Hollywood-studio version of a blended family and here we are.

That explains, as Deadpool doesn't, why he later points to Wolverine and tells confused bystanders, "Fox killed him. Disney brought him back. They're going to make him do this 'til he's 90." And it explains why Deadpool and Wolverine works much better for viewers already in the know and predisposed to like it.  Otherwise, good luck.

It takes a while for Wolverine to appear. In his non-heroic guise as Wade Wilson, Deadpool is now selling used cars, even though his dream job is becoming an Avenger. His life and the movie change when he is pulled in by the Time Variance Authority, the organisation that controls various timelines and alternate realties in the MCU. Matthew Macfadyen has an easy job playing Paradox, a smarmy TVA executive who informs Deadpool that his world's timeline is slowly dying and he wants his help wiping it out fast. For convoluted reasons, Deadpool instead recruits Wolverine to help him save his world.

The TVA can be sinister and confusing, but it is a convenient way to bring people back from the dead. Wolverine in the new film is still Logan, but a different iteration from a timeline we haven't seen before. His yellow and blue costume instantly makes him look sillier than usual and is a good match for Deadpool's tone. But while Jackman is always charismatic, this alternate Wolverine's personality rarely goes beyond snarling at Deadpool in f-bombing language, creating an unbalanced buddy pairing.  

Together they land in a desert landscape that Deadpool rightly describes as Mad Max-y. Emma Corrin is effectively creepy as Cassandra Nova, who lords it over the place, a purgatory called The Void where the discarded are sent to rot. Wolverine calls her "the bald chick" because she is Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart in the X-Men films) evil twin and has a matching shaved head. She also has the icky habit of pushing her fingers inside someone's face to feel their thoughts.

This long, sometimes flagging sequence includes the most callbacks to other movies. Some of the many cameo appearances are surprises. Others, including Jennifer Garner as Elektra, were already known. Channing Tatum appears and whether you get that joke or not, he is funny every time he opens his mouth. There are alternate Deadpools, including Reynolds in a second role where you actually get to see his face. That's a relief among so many stunt doubles lurking behind masks.

But the action, which takes over much of the movie, is a slog. The director, Shawn Levy, is best known for the Night at the Museum franchise, and action is not his strength. There are lots of scenes in which crowds of people run at each other, with Deadpool's swords and Wolverine's claws skewering their enemies and sometimes each other. The fights are about as sophisticated as watching kids in a playground, and they rely heavily on slow motion, as if that will instantly create tension.

Reynolds and Jackman have masterfully created a media campaign that is sometimes funnier than the film, including an ad in which their red and yellow costumes are compared to bottles of ketchup and mustard. "You can't unsee it," the tagline reads. At its sporadic best, Deadpool and Wolverine is that wry and entertaining. Overall it is middling, but sure to make enough money to keep ketchup and mustard coming back well into their 90s.

★★★☆☆

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.