🧂 Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

Disney spent four years and several billion dollars of IP acquisitions just to make a movie about how Disney spent four years and several billion dollars of IP acquisitions.

Directed by Shawn Levy. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. 2024.

🧂 Salt: 6 / 10. A movie that jokes about being a mercenary cash-grab is still, in fact, a mercenary cash-grab, and knowing it doesn't buy back the goodwill it spends. and ⭐ Stars: 6 / 10. Genuinely funny, structurally thin, and held together almost entirely by two performances that clearly love doing this.

Twenty years of dead and discarded timelines, and the thing that finally brings them back to life is a corporate merger with jokes attached.

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Shawn Levy's Deadpool & Wolverine opens with Wade Wilson digging up Logan's adamantium skeleton and beating a squad of TVA agents half to death with his own best friend's femur, and that's about as clear a mission statement as this franchise has ever given. This is a movie built entirely around the idea that the multiverse is a junk drawer, and the fun is rummaging through it. Wade's world is about to be erased by the Time Variance Authority because he, this universe's Deadpool, never amounted to anything "sacred" enough to keep. His solution is to drag a drunk, broken variant of Wolverine, the one who failed to save his own X-Men, out of early retirement and into a fight to save a timeline neither of them particularly respects.

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman spend the entire runtime insulting each other, and that friction is the only consistently good writing in the film. Wade's manic, fourth-wall-breaking optimism crashing against Logan's exhausted, self-loathing nihilism isn't a new dynamic, buddy action-comedies have run this play for decades, but Reynolds and Jackman sell it with a specificity that feels earned rather than assigned. Jackman in particular is doing real work under the wisecracks, playing a man who's already decided he's the villain of his own story and resents being handed one more chance to be a hero.

Emma Corrin's Cassandra Nova is a genuinely unsettling villain concept wasted on a script that forgets to give her a plan. Pulling minds out of skulls with her bare hands is a great, nasty power, and Corrin plays her with a reptilian stillness that's actually creepy in a franchise not known for creepy. But Cassandra's goals shift from "escape the Void" to "destroy this one specific timeline" to generic cosmic revenge depending on what the scene needs, and a villain that flexible isn't a character, she's a plot device wearing eyeliner.

The Void sequence is the film's most purely enjoyable stretch, and it's enjoyable almost entirely because of cameos rather than craft. Wesley Snipes' Blade, Jennifer Garner's Elektra, Channing Tatum finally getting to play the Gambit movie that never happened, they're fun to see, genuinely fun, but the film is content to let "remember this actor" do the emotional labor that writing usually has to do. The needle drops are doing heavy lifting too: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" scoring a brawl is a great needle drop and a slightly desperate one, a song picked because it's iconic, not because this scene earned it.

The opening-credits fight set to NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye," Logan's own skeleton as a weapon, is the one action sequence that actually understands what makes this franchise work. It's gory, it's gleeful, it's scored for maximum irony, and it never once breaks stride to explain the joke to you. Most of the film's other set pieces are competent but forgettable; this one is the exception that proves the movie had a better version of itself in there somewhere.

The verdict: a sequel that's funniest when it's not trying to mean anything and emptiest when it insists it does. Reynolds and Jackman's chemistry carries scenes the plot can't, Corrin's villain is a waste of a good performance, and the Void's cameo parade is a sugar rush that leaves nothing behind once the credits roll. It's never boring. It's also never quite more than the sum of its licensed parts.

So why only six shakers? Because a movie this self-aware about being a corporate product shouldn't also be this reliant on corporate nostalgia to fill the gaps where a real villain and a real stake should be, and a franchise this funny deserves better than "remember that actor from 2004" as its emotional climax.

So did bringing Wolverine back from the dead justify four years of fan theories? Mostly, yes, but only because Jackman and Reynolds are good enough to make a reunion feel like a reason, even when the script isn't.

Pass the salt. 🧂