Suicide squad: "Deadpool & Wolverine"

Given that Deadpool & Wolverine has taken roughly a squillion dollars over the course of the Olympics, it can be assumed that this is what the mass audience now wants. So what do they want? Escapism, first and foremost, arguably a variant of that some of us sought amid the widescreen spectacle of Paris 2024, and not wholly incomprehensible at a moment when even those of us fortunate enough not to be in Gaza or Ukraine are being confronted, on a daily basis, with dead bodies on our social-media timelines. Familiarity, too: recognisable names, faces, characters and costumes, a tone established in the opening frames that never modulates or relents, randomly applied songs from all our childhoods. (If you're wondering why N*SYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" - a bad song in 2000, no better now - has returned to the upper reaches of the UK singles chart, it's entirely down to D&W's credits sequence, in which Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool kebabs dayplayers while busting secondhand boyband moves.) If you were feeling especially optimistic, you could claim the film's success as proof of a desire for studio-backed comedy - that the multiplex crowd has once more gravitated towards the promise of jokes and levity, albeit in vastly greater numbers than they did to The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise in 2022 and Anyone but You over the Christmas break. Most of all, though, I think these numbers prove the audience wants something they've been sold on for the past 25 years - be that the X-Men series or the Johnny-come-latelys of the MCU - to continue. Where recent Marvel offerings - called things like The Marvels or Captain Marvel, in the desperate hope we might at least remember the name of the brand - landed as sputtering, incoherent afterthoughts, a Trump campaign speech in 2024, Deadpool & Wolverine is business as usual, full steam ahead. From its initial bout of gravedigging (addressing the question of how to revive a character finished off in 2017's Logan) to its constant repositioning of Deadpool as a "Marvel Jesus", the movie intends to resurrect. Its success has made for the industry story of the year, great for the trade papers: very rarely can you have seen a film where the dialogue threatens to be drowned out by the sound of studio stock rapidly ticking upwards. But that's just one problem with D&W: the sense we're dealing less with cinema per se than an especially potent dose of corporate Viagra.

For those of us who have no skin whatsoever in the games of the MCU, Disney's commercial fortunes or Reynolds' truly bizarre resurgence as a writer-producer-star-corporate shill, Deadpool & Wolverine is at best inexplicable, at its worst an impressive atrocity; it is to director Shawn Levy, the Canadian-born sleeper agent who's spent the best part of three decades attempting to destroy the American cinema from within, what 9/11 was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. As aggressively mediocre in its framing as it was in its promotion, often downright ugly in its effects, these never-ending 128 minutes mostly play like deleted scenes from shows and movies you haven't watched, held together by a postmodern narration that starts like a director's commentary, grows numbing inside ten minutes and so insufferable over the long haul you start to wonder whether Eli Roth's Borderlands, in the screen next door, can really be as bad as critics and audiences alike are making out. In as much as there is a narrative framework here - because the established non-rules of the Marvel multiverse apply - our heroes are two characters in search of a better author than this script's five credited writers (including Reynolds himself), set adrift amid "the Void", basically the rubble of the old studio system. An early scene has Deadpool alight upon the 20th Century Fox logo, half-buried in sand like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes: it's meant to be a knowing nudge in the ribs of anyone who's kept an eye on the Hollywood business pages, but plays, like all the other Disney-Fox schtick that makes it onto the screen, as merely gloating. Hugh Jackman, second best actor in this whole comic-book cycle after Downey Jr., at least remains true to the spirit of Wolverine: the character's anger meshes with the bemusement of a performer dragged into a cartoon version of the genre he'd thought he'd left behind. The curious thing about D&W is that, while utterly soulless in comparison with Logan, it's not an entirely terrible Wolverine movie; it's just that it's playing at the same time as what is, even by the low-to-non-existent standards of the Deadpool series, a truly abysmal Deadpool film.

The two standalone Deadpool films formed a snarky adolescent commentary on the growing ubiquity of all things superheroic - nothing too wounding, as they were themselves Marvel movies, but made under the banner of Fox, and with a hard R certificate, they enjoyed a measure of freedom with regard to the raspberries they blew that might seem exhilarating if you were fifteen years old. Now, after the Disney takeover, we learn Deadpool's alter ego Wade Wilson wants to "find his place" within the Avengers; granted, he sets about this sappy task while making the jokes about anal play he's been doing, incessantly, since film one. Again, everyone's pitching for transgressive B-movie pleasures - off-colour gags, exploding heads, baby knife - but this being a calculated A-budget proposition, indeed the centrepiece of Hollywood's summer season, D&W has to keep finding ways to take the edge off. Cameos from earlier action figures, found in the recesses of the fanboy imagination and decommissioned studio backlots; bits with Deadpool's scrappy dog; a lot of telling the audience what exactly it's doing and referencing. Yet rather than feeling reassured, I was instead gripped by a new and soul-sucking sensation: I wasn't just watching a bad film but a bad film that knows it's a bad film, and furthermore realising that the worst thing to have happened of late to American popular cinema (corporate superhero movies) just got a second chance at swallowing up the cultural oxygen, money, column inches and leisure time remaining to us. "They're going to make him do this when he's ninety," Deadpool joshes of Wolverine late on; here is a film that smirks and winks while telling us the movies aren't going to improve any in our lifetime. 

Critics appear to have left D&W alone in the main, whether reasoning that it's clearly Not for Us, running scared of the more rabid fanboys, or not daring to run anything that goes against an earlier, 20-page promotional feature. Some wannabe edgelord will doubtless include it on his year-end Sight & Sound Top 10 list, citing Levy's film as the most radical dismantling yet of classical Hollywood form, but - seriously - fuck him, and fuck the apologists, and fuck Ryan Reynolds, too, with his reverse-Bradley Cooper career, lapsing into well-compensated smuggery after realising not trying is easier than trying, and that you can make a lot of money peddling mediocrity with footnotes. (While I'm on this tear - because it's all connected - fuck Wrexham, tinpot nouveau riche chancers who've given us the least cheering underdog story in 21st century sport; fuck Disney-backed streaming shows about "the business of football"; and fuck Blake Lively for reconfiguring domestic abuse into glossily photogenic romantic fantasy, and enjoying a comparable hit with it. How symptomatic it is of these grim times that we should suddenly be confronted with a Hollywood power couple in the same way Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos were a power couple.) By some distance the worst film ever to make a billion dollars at the international box office, the type of runaway smash that leads you to believe an indiscriminate nuclear strike would only be the second most terrible fate to befall humankind in the present moment, D&W may ultimately say less about what the mass audience wants than about what our creatives have forced down their throats this past quarter-century - that, to lapse into Deadpoolesque scatology for a second, a generation-and-a-half of cinemagoers have now been successfully bullied into swallowing this shit. Fuck them, and fuck this.

Deadpool & Wolverine is now playing in cinemas nationwide.