Some movies feel significant divorced entirely from questions of quality; of course this isn’t very good, although it’s really no worse - or no worse a waste of two hours - than The Eternals, which is the MCU movie I’d pair it with on a conceptual double bill reckoning with the declining/devolving trajectory of the whole Marvel project. Where Academy award winner (TM) Chloe Zhao tried (badly and with evident strain) to “elevate” the material (I.e. do what she was hired to do), guiltless hack (and TIFF tribute!) Shawn Levy gladly chases the lowest common denominator,  a baseline embodied in the style and sensibility of Ryan Reynolds, a dead-eyed virtuoso who’s  so adept  at writing and acting and being Deadpool that it feels like second nature; it’s a tour de force. Hugh Jackman is a much better actor but he has the same heroically awful taste and commitment to the bit, such as it is. These two goofy, shameless, bi-curious (but not really!) lugs deserve each other, which is, naturally, the theme of the movie; their mutual superpower turns out to be their shared capacity for self-immolating self-pity, which pays off the whole running  “Marvel Jesus” gag (and speaks to the religious, masochistic, devotional tone of the whole thing). I’d say I caught about 60% of the references, which doesn’t speak very well of me but is what it is; I also laughed a few times, which, ditto.  In truth, its  almost a relief to see a movie that's so unembarrassed to be what it is - a cheerful, dirty inside joke for a massive mainstream audience it regards with entwined, abject affection and contempt - served straight up, without any care for craft, or art, or feeling beyond a bludgeoning sense of frattish solidarity, and without pernicious, careerist morons like the Russos trying to suggest that the color palette has something to do with Antonioni.