Deadpool And Wolverine gave cinema a massive live action hit just when it needed it. But now what? A few thoughts on Marvel’s huge movie success.
Spoilers lie ahead for Deadpool and Wolverine, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
We’re now in the gap between Deadpool And Wolverine’s run in cinemas and its home formats roll-out in October, as announced last week. I wanted this piece to not be a piece of clickbait, or to be the party pooper for a film where I’m clearly in the minority. In fact, I’m starting this article already from a position where 90% of people will disagree with me, and I get it. I remember being obsessed when I was young with Back To The Future Part II, when critical types were telling me it was a mess. Didn’t stop me enjoying it then, doesn’t stop me enjoying it now.
If you love Deadpool And Wolverine, all good. You got something out of it I didn’t.
My own position? I think Deadpool And Wolverine is pretty much the epitome of greasy burger cinema. I enjoyed the first 20 minutes a lot, but the remainder left me sinking more and more in my seat thinking: is this it? In an era where fan service appears central to blockbuster cinema, here’s arguably the first film that simply wouldn’t exist at all without it. The nods to the fans that used to be on the side of a film are now, well, the film.
Marvel Studios has the resources and gravitational pull to do what it wants, and duly has. The problem is that the restraint and measure to go beyond fan service and land a joke wasn’t there for me.
Take the quickly spoiled – and Marvel was spoiling lots of stuff itself – Wesley Snipes cameo. I chuckled when he first appeared, then gradually realised the he was going to keep appearing without actually much service to perform. The joke was that he was in it, occasionally throwing shade at Marvel’s attempts to get another Blade film going. But that was it.
It reminded me of when Elton John popped up out of seemingly nowhere in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle. When he landed on screen, it was a case of: look! There’s Elton John! But with each subsequent metaphorical wink to the camera, he was less a cameo, and more a paper-thin character. Overplay your cameo hand, and you need to bring in some character backbone. The assorted cameos of Deadpool And Wolverine – and I really loved the Chris Evans appearance – I found primarily overplayed, like an uncle on Christmas Day drunkenly telling the same joke on the hour, every hour.
With a production budget the envy of every other film of the season, the further surprise was that it looked, well, just a little drab.
I had problems with the excellent Furiosa earlier in the summer, but to see Deadpool And Wolverine try and take the piss out of it, aping its visual style with roughly the same money but a paucity of the same ambition, I found a bit jarring. Nothing to break the moment individually, but then those jarring moments piled up.
I also confess that the ‘Fuck Fox’ stuff trod a line unevenly to me between throwing bricks at a company whose corporate destruction cost thousands of people their jobs, and trying to respect their work.
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige gets directly namechecked in the film, and – understandably – his name is writ large on the screen too.
But it’s interesting, I thought, that the only reason Deadpool and Wolverine were allowed to venture into R-rated territory in the first place was because they were outside of the Marvel Studios ecosystem, and that Feige wasn’t doing the pathfinding. Other people took the gamble, Marvel and Feige get the billion dollar hit.
That’s the way of the world, certainly, and I’ve no quarrel with the fact that they’ve made a movie that’s encouraged so many people into a cinema at a time when that’s incredibly challenging to do.
It’s just, to me anyway, a little melancholic that one of the worst and least ambitious Marvel movies, a compilation album mining just shy of three decades of primarily other people’s cinema, has become the live action hit of the summer. And the reason I find that melancholic is that we know the drill now: a film makes a billion, so we’ll get more made to the same formula. It feels like a lowering of the bar, a far cry from Logan, the first Deadpool, or the kind of strong comic book movie storytelling that Marvel has delivered many times before.
To a degree, this isn’t particularly new. There was a late Carl Reiner movie – and I used to love Carl Reiner movies – called Fatal Instinct, that arrived in 1993. This also turned up in the slipstream of The Naked Gun and Hot Shots! hitting at the box office, and it presumably got greenlit off their success.
This was the era of generally forgotten spoof movies such as Wrongfully Accused and Jane Austen’s Mafia!, where knowledge of popular features was a perquisite to getting much out of the film. In the case of Fatal Instinct, and it’s far, far from Carl Reiner’s best, this was a film that crossed – as the title implies – Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. I remember an enthusiastic interview Reiner gave to the defunct US edition of Premiere magazine talking about the sheer number of movies being spoofed and getting hat-tips in his latest picture.
Yet there’s a review of Fatal Instinct that I think nailed the problem, credited to Malcolm Johnson of the Hartford Courant. He wrote that “taken on its own, Fatal Instinct is rarely hilarious and only fleetingly suspenseful. About all it offers is a series of trivia games, as hardcore movie buffs guess the sources and whisper eagerly to one another.”
To bring that to the present day, I’d swap the ‘whisper eagerly to one another’ for ‘laugh loudly enough so it’s clear they got the reference’. Other than that, there’s eerily close to what appeared on the screen over the summer.
I’ve tried to have some of this conversation on social media, and had it put to me that I hate comic book – superhero – movies anyway. Yet truth is I love them. I grew up on the Superman films. On Tim Burton’s Batman movies. I love Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, I think Black Panther is outstanding. Large chunks of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame are brilliant. I can chuckle through Thor: The Dark World (I know!), think Captain America: Civil War, Iron Man, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor, Iron Man 3, Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm, X-Men 2, Logan and Ang Lee’s Hulk are movies I could watch on happy rotation.
What I don’t like is the shift away from storytelling and substance, to winking, and trying to encourage us to guffaw at jokes you need foreknowledge to appreciate. Look at Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films: each film stands alone superbly well, no matter how much you know about the other chapters. Brought together, they’re enriched. That’s how it’s supposed to be.
But it’s not how it is, and I fear Deadpool And Wolverine is refuelling the wrong tanks. To me, it’s a greatest hits collection, just sung by a covers band. The characters are moot, the sketches are what matters. The multiverse idea and endless not very interesting fight scenes where there’s absolutely zero doubt as to the outcome are back in vogue. Jeopardy is gone, and in its place, gags about how Marvel isn’t as good as it used to be haw haw haw.
In the aftermath of Deadpool And Wolverine’s tremendous success, Marvel announced it was going backwards to find a new way forwards, which means that Robert Downey Jr is now being paid more than the budget of a 1990s blockbuster to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the Russo brothers – interesting, talented filmmakers who have struggled for a movie hit since their huge Avengers achievements – are getting similarly handsome cheques to return.
Going back to Fatal Instinct, the thing about that film is that it failed at the box office, and didn’t even get a cinema release in the UK. As such, Hollywood was discouraged from going back to that particular well. In the case of Deadpool And Wolverine, most studios in town would have spent the back of the summer wondering – not for the first time with Marvel – how they could do something similar. And my guess is the next couple of years, we’ll watch them try.
The thing is though, the debate per se is ultimately moot. Go through cinema history, and there are complaints from grumpy old sods like me that films lots of people like aren’t very good. I had fun with Hudson Hawk, and it was virtually a crime to say that out loud once upon a time.
I think it’s been a summer season with an unusual number of quality films. To differing degrees I’ve enjoyed The Fall Guy (a film that’s far, far better at playing to a movie nerd audience in my humble view), Twisters, Inside Out 2, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (okay, September, but it sort of counts), Longlegs, Blink Twice and Alien: Romulus. There’s much better out there, it’s just fewer people want to see them.
I accept that the headline to this is on the provocative side. But in my defence, I’d suggest this: Deadpool And Wolverine is both things I’ve suggested in said title.
But again: I’d throw in a third: I’m in the minority. That doesn’t stop me wishing Deadpool And Wolverine was a better film.
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