“Disney brought him back. They're gonna make him do this till he's 90.” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) about Wolverine (Hugh jackman)
The allure of super-hero movies is ultimately elusive to me when I try to reconstruct them the way I would a drama, comedy, or piece of art. First, like the current hit, Deadpool & Wolverine, some just don’t fit the formula, for it is both a comedy and an actioner. Additionally, it has superior dialogue in the form of the 1930’s screwball comedies with enough allusions to current pop culture and The Marvel Cinematic Universe to keep graduate students 100 years from now in perpetual research mode.
Secondly, it has two of today’s prominent actors in Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Reynolds is a master of co-writing terse, biting dialogue while he delivers it with the finesse of, say, Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Jackman carries as he always did guilt for his past sins and feelings of inadequacy about being a hero.
However, with his buddy Deadpool, he becomes a hero, not unlike the most famous buddies of all, Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid. Scenes here become almost always set pieces each preparing us for the next but never definitive (regeneration being a possibility in many cases). Their vulnerability is weak while they exploit the unnatural resources of their bodies and spirits to stall inevitable death.
For this “Deadpool,” getting to another time line to survive and possibly even change history would help both to reverse the guilt they feel for inadvertently causing deaths of those closest to them, both children and lovers. Although the dialogue deserves its R rating, the sentiment is boilerplate superhero stuff: find real love, find family, find yourself.
Deadpool & Wolverine is exciting summer fare for young adults and older. It’s beautifully photographed, and one of its themes centers on the bromance of the two leads and the general search for love and family. Although MCU is now owned by Disney, it is unsanitized with sparkling, smutty dialogue especially pleasing to word guys like me.
Deadpool & Wolverine
Director: Shawn Levy (Free Guy)
Screenplay: Levy, et al.
Cast: Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables)
Run Time: 2h 7m
Rating: R
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com