[Minor spoiler warning]
The long-awaited, much-promised Deadpool & Wolverine is finally here! I loved the first two of Deadpool's movie outings because of the very personal emotional stakes driving them. But with D&W, the scope went so broad, trying to cover so much ground that the overall flavour fell flat for me.
There's a lot to like about the elaborate set-pieces, spectacular fight choreography, and the always on-point sound and music design. There's plenty of fourth wall breaking, some quips eliciting 'ooh's from the audience for the burns delivered to all and sundry. Fight scenes were impactful, with I'll-burn-in-hell-for-laughing use of improvised weaponry, and every punch, stab and slash so viscerally sold, it's breathtaking. And when you have two main characters whose main super thing is healing fast, the action is non-stop, save for brief periods of exposition, and sometimes for interactions with an impressive list of cameos returning to the MCU stable.
What seems off about this latest Deadpool movie is that seeks to accomplish too much. It gives loads of flash and bang, but less of the heart and pathos that previously kept us sympathetic and rooting for what would otherwise be the erratic, annoying psycho that he is. For one thing, the colour palette really pops in D&W, making a clear departure from the moody, muted, grainy look of the earlier Fox-produced iterations. In addition, the stakes in D&W are set so high that it's easy to lose focus on the really important issue that's driving the plotline. Deadpool was a 'love story', Deadpool 2 was a 'family movie'. The unlikely narrative threads eventually and deftly wove themselves into exactly what each story promised to be. But in D&W, the foundational element wasn't clear, or if it was there, I didn't notice it.
The human element also took a backseat in D&W. The Deadpool franchise had strong supporting human characters -- Vanessa, Blind Al, Dopinder, TJ Miller's character, and Peter, but while they featured in the 1st act (minus TJ Miller), their presence was mostly reduced to a photograph Deadpool would look at now and then to remind himself and us what was 'real'. Instead, D&W tended to focus more on the superpowered folk, which is it's own kind of fun, but it's disappointing when there's more super than human in this sort of narrative.
Of the three Deadpool movies so far, I'll say that the first two have tied for first place as my favourite, while D&W clocks in as a close second. It's fun, there's lots of verbal and visual humour in the ridiculous situations D&W get involved with, there's lots of exciting 'whoa'-inducing scenes, and it's still not a movie to bring small children to, which is a big plus. Still, I wish it had more of a point other than being a celebration of itself as the latest arrival in the MCU.
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