The Fantasy Review’s review of Deadpool & Wolverine (2024).
Deadpool & Wolverine is a love letter to every superhero movie I watched on repeat as a kid, and shows how great a movie can be when you just give the fans what they want.
Marvel movies haven’t been great recently. I don’t just mean flops like The Marvels or mistakes like Thor: Love and Thunder. Since Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the MCU has become a soulless content mill for mediocre superhero movies.
Will this change because of Deadpool & Wolverine? Probably not, at least not right away. The hope is that Marvel Studios see the popularity of this movie, learn from what it got right, and start to make exciting blockbusters again.
It’s that or die, and some of those suits might be just fine with the latter if it means they don’t have to admit they made mistakes. Their wallet might disagree with them though.
Anyway, onto the main event!
Spoiler Free Review of Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
Deadpool & Wolverine is fucking brilliant. I don’t often swear in my reviews, but the raw emotional enjoyment I got from watching this movie demands it.
If you are going to make a new superhero movie in 2024 and you want it to make a splash, it needs to have soul. None of this Eternals nonsense, or The Marvels where you follow a simple formula in the most bland, AI-driven way possible.
Deadpool & Wolverine is like a breath of fresh air.
The fans get what we want, and we also get what we need. It’s like the delicate balance of looking after a toddler: sure, give them some TV time or an ice cream if they want, but there’s got to be a cut off. You just have to make sure that the TV break or bedtime that’s coming feels like a team effort, making everyone’s lives better.
The simple stuff like the story, plot, pacing, emotional moments, humor, etc, were pretty much spot on. Sure, we can question some of the plotting choices, and maybe it was a little overcrowded with cameos at times, but in the end I think most people are going to walk out of that cinema screen with a smile on their face.
Or they will be crying because they noticed the dedication to Henry Delaney, which was so lovely to see.
There is very little else to say that is spoiler-free other than if you grew up watching all the X-Men movies and other Fox superhero films, you will have the best time watching Deadpool & Wolverine.
Spoiler-Filled Review of Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
The only negative I have about Deadpool & Wolverine, which I want to deal with straight away, is the lack of expansion on the characters we have grown attached to over the previous Deadpool movies. There were so many cameos from other movies that we had no time to see banter between Deadpool and Dopinder, for example.
One of the characters we needed to see more of was Vanessa. Her and Wade are having a break, and she’s off with someone else. He’s lost and feels like he has nothing to live for. It’s a great premise for the movie, but one that doesn’t hold much emotional weight due to the fact Vanessa has about three lines of two words each. If we had seen more of that breakdown, more of that collapsing relationship, maybe the premise would have had a stronger foundation.
The positives next!
Toad, Sabretooth, Pyro, Elektra, Blade, Happy, Johnny Storm… oh MAN this movie was made for those of us who watched these movies on VHS in the 2000s! Plus, we got a live-action Gambit, which was both weird and awesome at the same time.
Combine all of that with Hugh Jackman’s incredible portrayal of the most emotionally broken Wolverine we have seen on screen to date (and that’s saying something), and if you fuck it up, you’re an idiot.
Shawn Levy, Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Zeb Wells wrote the script and they did an amazing job.
The whole movie was just one awesome moment after another, it was almost tiring to watch. Deadpool and Wolverine have two epic fights. Wolverine and Sabretooth have an anticlimactic epic fight. We see the colors, hear the voice, and think “no way is Captain America in this?!” and we are proven right as The Human Torch goes “flame on!” then flame off, then skin off.
I can’t list them all, but I can say that I spent every moment in that cinema glad I was nowhere else.
One thing Deadpool & Wolverine did amazingly well was its emotional moments. Deadpool movies have been pretty good at cutting off the humor to allow for some sincerity, but never this well before. Hugh Jackman and Dafne Keen’s (X-23) reunion hit hard. The argument between Deadpool and Wolverine before their second fight was more brutal than the violence that followed.
We should take some time to shine a spotlight on Emma Corrin’s portrayal of Cassandra Nova. If we ignore the slightly lazy writing about her motivations and eventual defeat, I thought her depiction of the character was epic and something I would love to see again, but in a more detailed, interesting story. Corrin’s portrayal deserved a script that cared a bit more about the character.
The lack of focus on the villain, however, was because of the massive shadow of Deadpool and Wolverine’s character arcs. They followed a similar path, from being lost to finally doing the right thing. It was simple, but the plot beats of the journey had heart, had soul, had depth – something sorely lacking from the MCU and many other recent movies and TV shows.
Deadpool & Wolverine proves that if you have a team of people who genuinely love what they are doing, and who are essentially fans making something for other fans, you will get a great product that people actually want to buy. When you make Tolkien’s work the latest AI product of a corporate machine, no one will watch it. When you turn a franchise against the people who used to love it, you are going to lose money.
Make art, and we will buy it. Make soulless husks of the franchises we love, and we will just look for something else to enjoy.
