alwaysbetondunc

[alwaysbetondunc]

Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life): A Critique Of Deadpool and Wolverine.

This critique will feature spoilers for Deadpool, Deadpool 2, Logan, Deadpool & Wolverine and the end of Gerry Duggan's run on Deadpool In Logan (2017), Logan comes to blows with a version of himself genetically constructed in a lab to be like Logan but “better” by an organization that has, through a form of eugenics, completely eradicated the mutant gene in humans and now seek to reintroduce them as soldiers for hire.

While our Logan has aged to the point where he is nearly unrecognizable as the hero he used to be, tired and depressed to near suicide, this cloned version of himself is “superior” in every way, he is faster, stronger, and able to act like the version of himself the organization demands of him, replaceable at a moments notice.

The movie ends with Logan and his daughter, Laura, finally killing the clone with the same bullet Logan was planning on using on himself. This fight however costs Logan his life, and with his daughter next to him, he dies with a new appreciation of his own life. 

Even if he cannot be the hero he once was, he’s happy he can live up to Laura's view of him and the X-Men. The Mutant world can survive without him.

Deadpool and Wolverine opens with Deadpool assuring us that none of that is changing, Logan is dead forever. He spends the rest of the movie replacing him with a version of who is faster, stronger, and able to act like the version of himself people demand of him.

Despite constant assurances that they are “in on the joke”, there’s nothing in the movie that suggests an understanding of the irony of that.

This is a common theme throughout the movie. It’s hard to tell if anybody while making it understood what they were doing or anything that came before, which is odd for a movie so eager to remind you that it’s self-aware at every possible turn.

The movie's first action scene, where Deadpool uses Logan’s Skeleton as a weapon to dispatch goons set to *N-Sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” which also serves as the movie’s opening titles gives us our first glimpse at this.

I get it, they’re saying they’re not gonna desecrate the ending of Logan and then use the character's corpse as a weapon, it’s not subtle but there’s something remarkably toothless here in comparison with its predecessors

In Deadpool 1 and 2, instead of traditional credits, the names of people are replaced with titles describing Ryan Reynolds as “God’s Perfect Idiot” or David Leitch, the director of Deadpool 2 as “One Of The Guys who killed the Dog in John Wick”. It’s nothing revolutionary but it sets a fun tone that sets the movie apart from its contemporaries.

In Deadpool and Wolverine, this joke is discarded with real names printed all over the action. They want you to know that they are proud of this, there are random shots of someone (who clearly isn’t Ryan Reynolds) dancing in the woods dressed as Deadpool just to pad out the scene so all the credits can fit in.  They’re willing to make the movie look worse so Kevin Fiege gets his.

It’s a movie characterized by a lack of awareness of anything that came before. 

Despite being a sequel to Logan and 2 Deadpool movies there’s very little to suggest anybody watched these before making the movie.

The events of Deadpool 2’s post-credits scene where Deadpool goes back in time to save his girlfriend, and Peter are a crucial element of the plot, but then Deadpool 2’s best characters, Cable, Domino, and Russel are notably absent, handwaved away as unfortunate casualties between movies.

But Shatterstar is still alive somehow, his friendship is somehow incredibly important to Wade even though he hated him in the last one. And he also died. That was the second movie's best joke, all of these comic-accurate characters who were gonna push the franchise forward died horribly due to weather conditions.

When Deadpool goes back in time, the joke is that he doesn’t save X-Force, he just saves Peter because he likes the guy, so he tells him to leave so he doesn’t die alongside the other members. But now, Shatterstar is one of Deadpool’s closest friends which he can’t imagine living in a new universe/timeline without.

The first 2 movies do a lot to set Deadpool apart as a character from the people he “shared” a universe with, the first is a basic revenge plot where Deadpool saves his girlfriend and then kills his villain in the middle of a speech from Colossus about what “being a hero means”, Deadpool isn’t going to be like those guys in the X-Men because he doesn’t need to be.

2 goes further in this direction, the whole emotional core of the movie is hinged on this difference. After losing the love of his life, Colossus tells him he always has a place with the X-Men where he can finally be the hero he deserves to be. But while out on an audition mission with them, he fails because he doesn’t want to be the hero on the face of cereal boxes or save the world from the next big villain, he just wants to help a kid abused by the people who were supposed to protect him.

The rest of the movie follows him trying everything in his power to do this, he doesn’t care about the big picture, he just wants to help this one kid, Russell, despite everyone telling him that he’s wrong for doing so. Because he sees himself in this kid, someone abused by the powers that were supposed to help him.

In the end, Wade succeeds, convincing everyone that this kid is worth saving and that people can be redeemed, because he can be redeemed. Deadpool moves forward with his new team of Russell, Cable, and Domino. The Fox X-Men can keep their huge world-ending adventures, The X-Force exists to contrast them and move forward in their way.

If you’ve seen Deadpool and Wolverine, you might notice that this arc is just copied verbatim but worse, instead of the X-Men, Wade now wants to be a part of the Marvel Universe, and instead of Russell, Deadpool now has to save Wolverine from his fate. 

Deadpool ends the movie realizing he doesn’t need to be part of the big special team to matter, except now instead of the reasoning being because Wade has found his way of saving people, it’s just because he and Wolverine get to save the universe in a bit ripped straight from the first Guardians Of The Galaxy.

Where Deadpool 2 ends on the note that Deadpool doesn’t need to be like the X-Men to succeed, Deadpool and Wolverine want you to know that the reason Deadpool can succeed is that he can be like the Avengers, an ideal that everybody should live up to.

Wolverine’s arc is the same, ripped directly from the last movie but worse. Logan’s arc in Logan is one of a dejected man who believes the world doesn’t need heroes because he and the X-Men failed and if they can’t win how can anyone else? He finishes the movie realizing the world doesn’t need the literal X-Men to go on because the next generation of New Mutants can continue without him.

Wolverine’s arc in Deadpool and Wolverine is one of a dejected man who believes the world doesn’t need heroes because he failed the X-Men. He finishes the movie realizing that he can perfectly replace the other Wolverine, who died to help make a world that didn’t need him, without any hindrance because he��s a cool Wolverine who wears the mask from the comics and can still say the fuck word a lot.

The problem is, I don’t give a shit about this new Wolverine because the Wolverine I care about already had a perfect ending, this Wolverine is a pure simulacrum, there to remind me of the character I actually like, it doesn’t matter how many cowls you shove on a 55-year-old man, nothing can change that.

These choices define the movie. Deadpool goes to all these different universes looking for a Wolverine to replace his where they play all the hits, there’s a comic-accurate short Wolverine, Patch, Age Of Apocalypse Wolverine, a version of Wolverine that plays out his first appearance against the Hulk.

Before Wolverine fights anyone, Deadpool pauses the movie to tell the audience, that Deadpool’s finally going to fight Wolverine, or, Wolverine is finally going to fight Sabretooth, the audience has been waiting decades for it (even though they fought in every single movie they appeared in together), Deadpool fights hundreds of Deadpool’s just like he did in the comics.

Deadpool lands on this Wolverine and chooses him as the perfect one because he wears the Yellow and Blue tacticool spandex under his uniform. So much of this movie feels designed less because it wants the characters to do interesting things but rather because it has a checklist to fill out to make the imagined audience happy.

In one of the most embarrassing interviews any director has ever given to a major publication, Shawn Levy told Vulture: “I’m not looking to make movies and shows for an audience of seven cool kids in the corner. I build stories for populist entertainment.”

This is ironic considering just how much this movie feels designed with the opposite of this mindset, who honestly gives a shit that you brought back Jennifer Garner’s Elektra or Wesley Snipes’ Blade and that you’re finally giving them “the ending they deserve” (ignoring the fact that Blade had an entire trilogy that had an ending, one that Ryan Reynolds was in!).

Are you making populist entertainment when you feature an emotional pay-off for Channing Tatum’s Gambit never getting a movie, something you’d only really remember if you paid attention to the studio slate of a dying studio over half a decade ago?

It’s a statement that feels incredibly disrespectful considering what came before, the Fox slate wasn’t perfect but it was certainly interesting and I would argue it’s a much better example of “populist entertainment” than anything that shows up here.

Populist entertainment doesn’t have to exclude quality, sure, Logan is an emotional end to a franchise that asks us to watch the heroes we grew up end but it’s also a movie where you get to see a guy with claws in his hands violently stab people while his daughter flies about killing her oppressors, is that not Populist enough?

These have always been populist entertainment but there was also a point where they were good, something that can’t be said for Deadpool and Wolverine, a movie that just expects you to clap because a terrible CGI model of Hugh Jackman is finally wearing a cowl.

I should be the perfect audience for this movie, it’s the grand finale of 25 years of movies I grew up with, I have been a fan of Deadpool for almost as long as I have been reading comics, the same goes for Wolverine.

In the UK, the company Panini published monthly collections of a few comics that were always a few years behind, after school every few weeks me, and my mum would go to W.H. Smiths and pick up the latest.

The ones I always went back for were The Astonishing Spider-Man (which birthed my love for the 80s and 90s Spider-Man comics through their reprints) and Wolverine And Deadpool, I remember being shocked that such a book existed at the time, this was years before the game or the movie were a thing.

But there it was, a monthly book partially celebrating my favourite character, sure, most of the book was reserved for Wolverine and, sure, the Deadpool books were in there to pad the book so the Wolverine side wouldn’t catch up to the American books too fast but I was happy he got any coverage at all.

I felt a sense of kinship with Kevin Feige when the MCU started to become a thing, he was a comic nerd like me and he would finally get to depict these characters that we all wanted, he got his start on the original Fox X-Men, a movie famously averse to depicting the yellow spandex that defined the X-Men comics.

A set averse to even acknowledging the comics as worth anything, the story goes that Feige snuck comics to cast members, eager to let these movies reflect the books they were based on, it’s a cute story that shows his passion for the medium.

But the difference is, I grew up. I still love these characters and the books they came from but as I grew I started to realize that the reason I loved them wasn’t that they wore specific costumes or had specific iconography, it was because of the writers and artists that made them, that the MCU seems so eager to delete from the equation, creators like Joe Kelly, Ed McGuinness, Gerry Duggan, Gail Simone, Tony Scott, Fabian Nicienza, Frank Quietly, and Grant Morrison.

All of their hard work appears in some form in this movie, as butchered as they are, the characterization of Deadpool that was defined by Joe Kelly’s run that solidified him as a wisecracking 4th wall breaker, in search of redemption, Gerry Duggan’s further jump into meta-commentary with an ending that mimics Morrison’s run on Animal Man gets some play here, with Deadpool 2099 and Zenpool even appearing as multiversal variants of the character.

The movie also sees fit to adapt some of Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men with the main villain being Cassandra Nova, I still cannot tell why they chose this villain, considering she doesn’t come across like her comic counterpart aside from her relation to Charles Xavier, how she looks and psychic powers. By the end of the movie, her motivation and multiversal plot to rule a land of amalgamated universes ends up mirroring Jonathan Hickman’s depiction of The Maker more than anything.

But these names are shoved miles down in a special thanks section of the credits, nowhere near the lavish and “fun” opening action sequence that prominently gives credit to Kevin Feige, the man who seeks to take all of these creatives' work and boil them down into a bland soup of iconography.

Chapter 28 of MCU: The Reign Of Marvel Studios describes Feige’s approach to adaptation, after viewing the failures of his time working on the X-Men movie refusing to use the comics they were based on, he sees himself as a savior of these characters, taking them from their original “bad” adaptations and saving them by making them more “like the comics”.

But his idea of what makes something like the comics is shallow, it’s not about the people who made the characters who they were, it’s about whether or not they say their famous catchphrases or if they wear some version of the costume they’re known for.

And at the end of it all, that’s why this movie exists, it doesn’t matter that it’s just another attempt at adapting the bones of Old Man Logan into a worse film, it doesn’t matter if it walks over everything that came before, all that matters is getting Wolverine to finally wear a cowl.

In many ways, Deadpool in this movie is Feige’s self-insert, telling the audience they can be safe and happy because they’re finally getting what they’ve wanted all these years.

The final shot of Logan features Laura, taking the cross that lies above Logan’s makeshift grave and placing it at an angle to represent the X in X-Men, it’s a powerful shot that uses the imagery of everything that came before to, finally, put to rest a character we all love.

The final shot of Deadpool and Wolverine is different. After an entire movie spent replacing the character we love with a version that’s stronger, faster, and able to act like the version of himself Disney demands of him, we get a shot of both Deadpool and Wolverine’s masks divorced from the characters that made us love them. Nothing else remains except marketable IP.