This may just be a sign of shifting audience preferences, bad vibes from bad behavior behind the scenes, or even active suppression by their new owners, but it’s genuinely strange to be how little we seem to acknowledge the influence that the Marvel movies made by Fox had on the superhero genre as a whole. Sure, DC might have gotten there first – Richard Donner updated the Superman legend for the blockbuster era and Tim Burton proved that you could make a “serious” Batman movie even if people still remembered Adam West – but the Fox X-Men movies and their peers were more than just Hugh Jackman’s Hollywood debut. There’s no doubt that Jackman’s presence and portrayal of James “Logan” Howlett were the main draws after a certain point, but these movies were so much more than that. I promise that this isn’t just filler to get around talking about the specifics of Shawn Levy’s Deadpool and Wolverine – well, actually, it is, given that this is a spoiler-free review of a movie that has quite a bit to spoil in it – but that, in a strange way, is the entire ethos of the film, making a case through its megawattage leads (each of whom will draw viewers to the screen like moths regardless of the movie’s quality) for the relevancy and, more importantly, the quality of that body of work.
A quick note: When I say “Fox” Marvel, I’m also including New Line Cinema’s output here, because it is part-and-parcel of that first generation of Marvel superhero movies, and I would include the Raimi Spider-Man movies as well, just because they’re essentially an additional proof-of-concept for what the genre would become. Turn your pages to 2000: An ensemble superhero movie, directed by the guy who made The Usual Suspects, is about to arrive in theaters. It’s got decent brand recognition thanks to its long history at newsstands and on spinner racks at gas stations, even though mass-market sales are a thing of the past and the comic book store is pretty much the only game in town if you want to read single issues, and a popular cartoon that ran for a few seasons a few years back.
It’s been an interesting period for the genre: There’s been the rise and fall of superhero television, with shows like The Flash, Lois and Clark and even an ill-fated Justice League pilot winding up on screens; Blade, the genre’s first properly R-rated flick hit just two years ago with Wesley Snipes in the lead, and was successful enough for New Line to merit a sequel (and they’re courting a minor-leaguer Mexican director for its sequel, who will inspire a pretty good sequel and some of the worst writing you will ever read in your life by a film critic with a major platform); and the bottom fell out basically everywhere along the way.
Industry turmoil has had its ill effects on the genre: Marvel nearly went bankrupt thanks to a wholesale industry collapse; DC’s Batman series fumbled the transition between its directors and their bullshit with The Death of Superman over in the print world fucked everything up (though their competitors didn’t help with foil covers and gimmicky storylines); and there’s been a string of flops attempting to capitalize on whatever attention the genre could get (Steel, Barb Wire, Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, The Phantom, The Shadow). If you had to guess where things were headed, based on the evidence, you’d think X-Men would be a disaster. It’s by no means an underdog – it’s a tentpole feature – but the perpetual rake-stepping by the powers-that-be make it only slightly more likely to succeed than not. It’s a product of its time, for sure: The lack of recognizable comedians distinguishes it from, say, Mystery Men, but it’s got a similar late-‘90s aesthetic. Everyone’s decked out in black leather, there’s “edge” wherever they can find it, and, frankly, the entire production is fucking embarrassed that they’re making a comic book movie. The stench of fungus-covered jock straps still follows the locker-stuffed genre around – no matter how much that Star War made, these movies are still for nerds and children, after all (a truism that would rightfully be answered with a “So?” in about twelve years) – but X-Men’s solution to that problem is much like Blade’s. Charisma. Cool. And, sure enough, it begins things anew.
Fox would, of course, fuck things up in a righteous fashion less than five years later, as the genre hit a strange two-year nadir following Batman Begins stealing the attention away from the Merry Marvel Marching Society (Bryan Singer’s departure for the Distinguished Competition and Brett Ratner’s hiring for the third X-Men movie pissed nerds off to no end), but 2008 would forever change things. If you’d looked at the credits for Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, you’d see the name of a Boston-born associate producer slowly rise up the ranks — he’d long been an assistant to head honcho Avi Arad at Fox (and better yet, a hype-man for the franchises he ran to all of the online outlets that acted as the genre’s new trade publications), and he slowly became a power broker – his vision for a shared universe for these characters, for Marvel to seize on its world as its strongest asset, would capitalize on Chris Nolan’s momentum and mint billions. The writing was now visible on the wall for Fox, but no one really knew how it’d go down, though an acquisition by Disney was probably the least likely possibility. In the meantime, they’d try to do something different. How about an R-rated comedy that only was greenlit because someone – perhaps even its star and main advocate – leaked a demo reel to YouTube? Or an R-rated capstone to the original X-Men films, starring the one true-blue leading man they introduced to the world?
This, strangely enough, is the context that informs Levy’s film, and I almost don’t want to cite him as its sole author because it’s really the triumvirate of Jackman, Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Feige acting as shot-callers here. Feige’s oftentimes seen as the auteur of the MCU, but these aren’t his toys that he’s playing with – Reynolds basically owns the Deadpool character at this point with all he’s done for that franchise, and Jackman’s Wolverine is both the main draw here and one of the final extant reminders of those movies’ effects on popular culture. As such, they’re the first people with legitimate leverage that he’s had to work with since Robert Downey Jr. left, and they’re the ones dictating terms.
It’s both helpful that he’s thirsty for a W after a three-year drought and sympathetic, like his audience (and I include myself in this), to nostalgic sentiment. He’s cast by his supporters as nerd messiah and his detractors as cinema’s antichrist, when in actuality he’s more like Ray Kroc: the proliferation of his product has been a net negative on his industry as a whole, but every once in a while, a Quarter Pounder hits the spot. Much for the same reason, as well: it’s a reminder of good days, perhaps ones with fewer responsibilities, when the ambition behind and the applied science that went into making the burger were more obscured by its sensory pleasures. The enterprise is much more generous than you might expect, as it’s not so much a tribute to the House That Feige Built or even the Mansion That Arad Manifested, but that these movies and characters were, once upon a time, exactly what was needed at the time.
It’s that feeling – paired with the anarchic juvenilia of Reynolds’ schtick – that separates Deadpool and Wolverine from its live-action multiverse ilk, as well as its less-than-respectful attitude about the whole “alternate universes” enterprise. Special appearances are plentiful (though not too plentiful), but they’re often undercut by the humor (unlike the appearance of the Spider-Men in No Way Home, whom Feige and Sony expected us to drop to the ground Wayne’s World-style and shout “We’re not worthy” at fucking Tobey Maguire) or are tributes to… stranger figures from years past? It’s also, weirdly enough, a lighter Deadpool story, at least compared to the first two installments, even as it tries to tackle this complex task of image-rehabilitation for an era of studio filmmaking, a tonal shift that has its pros and cons. If jokes were plate appearances, the numbers would be up but its slugging percentage would be down – yet it hits the long ball better. There’s plenty of genuinely shitty or lazy jokes, but there are a few, especially in the back half of the movie, that are funnier than anything that has ever come out of Marvel-Disney. The action, as well, is stronger than the average MCU fare, with Levy seizing the opportunity for smaller-scale bloody action: there are no opposing multi-colored lasers here, just cold, hard adamantium tearing through flesh.
What Deadpool and Wolverine doesn’t have is some universe-shaking import that acts as an advertisement for Things to Come, which is refreshing enough after endless Marvel teases that never come to fruition. If, somehow, you’ve only seen the Deadpool and X-Men movies, you won’t be too confused by references to Loki and other Disney+ shenanigans, because they’re not really a feature here – they’re more just inciting incidents. And since the Fox universe is effectively dead in any meaningful creative sense (unless Feige announces Avengers vs. X-Men at Comic-Con this weekend as a way to get out of the Kang Katastrophe that Marvel’s found themselves in), there’s not too much that they can do without stumbling over the threads of The Plan that are laid out on some whiteboard in Burbank. What matters more is giving the pre-Iron Man Marvel a chance to celebrate itself for what’s likely to be the final time they’ll be able to do so on their own terms without the aggressive forward momentum that Disney requires, and it’s a tactic I’m more sympathetic to than not, given that I’m square in the target demos for this type of pandering.
But it’s the nature of the sentiment that keeps Deadpool and Wolverine from getting treacly – an irony-tinged edge that dulls the saccharine nature of its tribute into something more palatable, like onion and mustard preventing the ketchup from overwhelming the burger. That’s fundamentally what the Deadpool films do, given that the creative ethos lies solely with its star. If there’s any better summation of Reynolds’ attitudes and intentions with all of these movies, it comes in the film’s closing credits, which restate the film’s thesis in a fashion familiar to anyone who’s graduated from high school in the last three decades. It’s hoary, goofy, and tongue-in-cheek, but it’s weirdly moving all the same.