Deadpool & Wolverine is the cinematic equivalent of slop. Deadpool has officially arrived in the MCU with all the impact of a wet fart. Many moviegoers, myself included, looked to Deadpool and Wolverine as a film with the potential to salvage some of the ill will Marvel has harvested the last couple of years. It was shaping up to be a swan song for all those Fox characters while also self-serving Disney as they go “look guys, we CAN make an R-rated superhero movie! See??” The end result is an unfunny, totally unserious, meandering mess. 

It probably happened somewhere between the first and second Deadpool, but Ryan Reynolds has some serious Green Goblin mask whispering to him energy about him. I don’t know if he’s just let this character consume him, or he’s always thought of himself in such high regards. Either way, his/Deadpool’s humor is a really tired bit at this point. It could be that I’m not a teenager anymore or that I’m not a 19th century peasant, because no matter how creative the dick and ball jokes are they’re just not funny. This was the first Marvel movie where I felt like it was being specifically catered to Disney adults. 

Shawn Levy was not hired to direct this project because of his storied professionalism or the cinematic acumen he’s cultivated over his twenty year career. He’s Reynolds’ close friend and his lowbrow toilet humor fit the bill well. That is to say this movie was made for the lowest common denominator. Levy himself defended his lack of style as a net positive for “populist entertainment.” Straight from the director’s mouths folks; he’s uninterested in challenging audiences expectations, instead he and the four other credited writers threw everything they could at the wall and you guessed it—everything stuck. 

Having the third Deadpool movie be a heartfelt sendoff to the Fox franchise was a creative decision, one that almost pays off. There honestly weren’t as many cameos as I had expected, probably only about 4-5 are actually important players in this story. But over the course of the movie, the dialogue is constantly beating us over the head with nods and jests at Marvel/Fox’s expense. Many of us have said this before, but when your writers are openly acknowledging the mess of your cinematic universe—or the horribly misunderstood accent a character is using—it only brings to attention the flaws. It’s not funny to make fun of yourself when those flaws are glaringly apparent already, it only makes them that much more annoying. 

I’ll be generous and say I laughed at about 10% of the jokes, with exactly two bits getting an actual physical response from me and not an exhalation of air from my nose. Just keep in mind that this movie is so unserious in its execution and nothing is sacred. Bringing back Hugh Jackman is the prime example. His playing Wolverine is one of my favorite roles in all of superhero cinema, so of course this movie thinks it’s hilarious with the constant references to their walking all over his grave. Yet for all the pomp and circumstance in bringing him back, and the fact that he’s half of the title, I felt he was fatally underused. I guess the game plan all along was to have Hugh reprise his historic role simply to be a constant reminder that this is R-rated so he could use the word fuck as much as possible. This movie’s comedic philosophy is pretty in line with the previous entries, but as a threequel its mileage is really showing. 

I’m hesitant to say this movie was written for children like many other Marvel movies, but man does this humor just not hit anymore. Audience’s reactions seems to be souring a lot of people’s experiences, and I can say our crowd was pretty rough too. The teenagers down the row from us were stomping their feet at the most juvenile lines, I could hear grown men audibly reacting and loudly adding their two cents between gags, and the amount of clapping—my god, these people are not making it any easier to enjoy this slop. Deadpool & Wolverine turned out to be exactly what it promised us to be: a mind-numbing, uncreative hodgepodge of unserious ideas lacking any heart or a lick of artistic merit.

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