The Marvel Cinematic Universe just got very bloody. The long-awaited team-up of Hugh Jackman’s bad-tempered Wolverine and Ryan Reynolds’s foul-mouthed Deadpool is a savage upper cut of a movie that really commits to earning its 15 rating – a first for MCU movies, following The Walt Disney Company’s purchase of 21st Century Fox, which previously made Deadpool , Wolverine and all the X-Men films, and whose characters are now going to be integrated into the MCU in an attempt to fix the flailing superhero franchise. MCU films has until now been teen-friendly, but Deadpool & Wolverine has Tarantino-worthy blood spatter – swords through throats, blades in bums – and lewd banter that covers everything from boners to cocaine.
The Marvels this is not. In the comics the frenemy duo – both blessed and cursed with the ability to heal from even the most noxious wounds – are a long-time fan favourite, but on screen we’ve only ever seen Logan fight the Merc with the Mouth back in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine , when Reynolds’s Deadpool was a mute assassin who incurred online wrath for deviating from the quippy antihero of the source material. Reynolds has worked hard to move on from that with the Deadpool reboots (2016 and 2018), and here, the character is joyfully obscene.
Director Shawn Levy sets the tone straight out the gate with a pre-credits scene that sees Deadpool brutally slaughter multiple people while wearing a key character’s skeleton, making necrophili.