As Deadpool jokes several different times over the course of Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is experiencing "a bit of a low point" since the massive success of Avengers: Endgame. Fortunately, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is here to shake things up by joining the MCU and making things weird, right? Maybe not, because Deadpool & Wolverine is just an R-rated version of a bog-standard modern Marvel flick: It's pretty funny, the story centers around the same CGI macguffin stuff as always, the third act is utterly baffling and feels like a bunch of stuff was cut, and there are ultimately no meaningful plot connections to the MCU. Standard stuff for the last five years of this franchise, and a major disappointment for the only MCU movie on the 2024 calendar.
Not that Deadpool & Wolverine is awful. It's got several great bloody action sequences, including an opening bloodbath set to NSync's "Bye Bye Bye," and when it's funny, it's really funny. But, just like with Deadpool 2, Deadpool & Wolverine is strangely full of earnestly emotional scenes that don't track at all next to all the silly, fourth-wall-breaking wisecracks, and now we get the added bonus of an overly complicated MCU story that requires far too much explanation despite actually being razor-thin.
The setup for Deadpool & Wolverine is basically Deadpool's version of the Loki series. He's pulled out of his reality by the Time Variance Authority--folks from outside of time who keep the timelines straight--and brought to Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen). Paradox tells Deadpool that his home universe is dying because it lost its "anchor being," Wolverine--this is meta humor about Logan being by far the most popular of the X-Men, how the franchise didn't work without Hugh Jackman, and the MCU subsuming Fox's Marvel franchises after the merger with Disney. Paradox offers to let Deadpool join the Avengers if he'll help accelerate the destruction of his home universe. There's never any discussion about what Paradox actually wanted him to do, though, as Deadpool rejects the offer and takes his own path by hopping across the timelines to find a new Wolverine, and then the two of them end up stuck at the end of time for most of the movie.
That setting, called the Void, was introduced during Loki Season 1 (Deadpool actually cites the specific episode that it first appeared in, hilariously), and it's basically limbo--it's where people go when the TVA folks poke them with their time sticks. When Loki went there, he met tons of other Lokis. But Deadpool and Wolverine just meet a lot of the D-tier mutant baddies from the X-Men movies, like Toad, and a large number of variant Deadpools--and also Professor X's impossibly powerful evil twin sister, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who was supposed to have died during childbirth. She's actually super cool, particularly when she puts her fingers inside people's heads (it'll make more sense when you see it).
It's all meaningless, though. Deadpool & Wolverine's story doesn't work very well, which is not itself necessarily a problem, since this is supposed to be a comedy film and the plot naturally comes second to that. Except it doesn't. This is an MCU movie through and through, and that means there's an excessive amount of time spent explaining stuff to set up a third act where that stuff doesn't actually matter much.
Fortunately, it does frequently work from scene to scene--basically any time Deadpool & Wolverine switches to its needle-drop action-sequence mode, which is a pretty decent chunk of the movie, it works great. The "Bye Bye Bye" sequence starts the movie off perfectly on a high note, and it's never long before we get another, similar scene--my favorite is probably when Deadpool and Wolverine tear each other apart in an old Honda Odyssey.
But outside of those scenes, which are glossy and look good, the production is pretty much Marvel-standard assembly-line stuff. Everything by the book, standard camera angles, standard editing pace, standard CGI environments. But that's what you get when you hire a filmmaker like Shawn Levy, who is exceptionally talented at delivering movies that earn a 6/10 audience rating from IMDb users with stuff like Cheaper by the Dozen, Date Night, and Night at the Museum. Levy has never been a filmmaker who elevates his material, and that hasn't changed with Deadpool & Wolverine.
The copious cameos help a little bit with some of these parts--I won't spoil them, but the highlight is an early Fox/Marvel movie character who meets a particularly heinous end at Cassandra's hands. But the cameos are quickly overshadowed by Cassandra, who is essentially the R-rated version of Evil Wanda in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Corrin is a creepy blast in the role, even though the character's storyline doesn't track at all in the third act.
Unfortunately, these cameos don't really add up to much. There are lots of random characters from Fox Marvel movies, but not many who matter to either of the title characters. And they contribute to Deadpool & Wolverine's ultimate downfall: its complete inability to wrangle its tone. This film constantly hops between Deadpool making stupid jokes and Wolverine very sincerely pondering every mistake he's ever made in his life, and it's hard to deal with--by the end of the movie, that tonal whiplash had rendered me numb to just about any feelings at all.
The punchline to all this is that we didn't really go anywhere. Deadpool & Wolverine doesn't change the MCU or affect any other ongoing stories, and the MCU's actual presence in the film is minimal. This is the MCU in a nutshell these days: giving off the impression that things are happening, without actually doing anything. Sure, some of the jokes were very funny, and some of the action was very good, but Deadpool & Wolverine is the worst Deadpool movie.
