With its gory action scenes and meta jokes, Deadpool & Wolverine is a fun mess. Although it seems to lose itself in its own sketch.

Expected to be one of the films of 2024 and certainly the most important film in the MCU for some time. Deadpool teams up with Wolverine to bridge the gap between Marvel and the X-Men for the next phase, and also ends the successful Deadpool trilogy with a flood of jokes and ambiguous situations.

To fully appreciate Deadpool & Wolverine, you need to be part of the superhero culture. By repeatedly using and recycling references to MCU films and Disney’s financial situation (e.g., the acquisition of 20th Century Fox), Reynolds obviously plays the 4th wall card. The references and jokes follow one another at breakneck speed, as do the script’s initial expositions. The two go hand in hand right up to the end, as the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed, the one-liners and jokes disguising the whole. It’s hard to even summarize what’s going on in this film and what’s really at stake. Along the way, the two meet Cassandra Nova, as well as a large number of other characters, often just passing through for a fight or a joke.

But Deadpool & Wolverine rests above all on its two namesake characters. With a more serious and cold tone, Hugh Jackman once again shines brightly in his character’s costume. He and Reynolds make a strong pair, creating a deliberately two-tiered duo in their dialogue. While Wolverine brings a more psychological and tortured aspect, the overall laid-back atmosphere often takes over and prevents Hugh Jackman from really having his moments. As for Deadpool, it’s as hard as ever to take him seriously, despite the film’s many attempts to do so. When your character doesn’t give a damn about anything that happens to anyone else, then the audience doesn’t give a damn about anything that happens to you. 

In this wave of jokes, some of which work better than others, the multiverse and the MCU/Disney take a beating. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help to make fun of Marvel’s narrative refrains only to repeat the same mistakes in the process. Narratively, Deadpool & Wolverine seem familiar and immensely confusing. Caught up in an incessant deluge of exposition about the multiverse and why this story is important, the film feels obliged to explain before each major sequence why it’s crucial to the narrative.  One thing’s for sure, Reynolds and Shawn Levy make this a film that knows how to be fun to watch and especially to listen to with its dialogue and Reynolds/Jackman dynamic.

But in the end, it’s hard not to see Deadpool & Wolverine as a film with a narrative custom-made to insert as many jokes, cameos and other situations as possible, at the cost of coherence and understanding of the story. We’re left to wonder whether, when we rediscover the film in 15-20 years’ time, once audiences have forgotten the references mentioned in the film, Deadpool & Wolverine will be nothing more than an incomprehensible accumulation of dated jokes, barely a film at all.