Deadpool & Wolverine is as much fun as you can conceivably have at a corporate merger meeting . It’s tedious, yet, occasionally, Ryan Reynolds’s fourth wall-allergic “Merc with a Mouth” will pass a note around the table with a penis drawn on it, and everyone can have a quiet, little chuckle to themselves. We’ve been gathered here, supposedly, to discuss the integration of 20th Century Fox’s slate of Marvel characters – primarily the X-Men and Fantastic Four, acquired when Disney bought Fox in 2019 – via the long-awaited onscreen reunion of the most irritable guy in superhero cinema history, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and the most irritating guy in superhero cinema history, Reynolds’s Deadpool.
Both, in 2009, starred in Fox’s maligned and speedily excised from history X-Men Origins: Wolverine . It’s not worth dwelling on the memory. Here, Deadpool is Deadpool no more, with Wade Wilson having hung up the red mask and turned the innuendo down to a low simmer following several abortive attempts to join a legitimate superhero organisation.
Nobody wants him, until the TVA wants him – that is, Marvel’s own time cops, first introduced in the Loki series , and here represented by Matthew Macfadyen’s agent Mr Paradox (with enough whiff of Succession ’s Tom Wambsgans that it’s a real joy when he calls someone a “drooling boob”). Long story short, Wade’s entire world will be deleted from existence unless he, for plot reasons, can track down a viable.