Deadpool & Wolverine – SPOILER discussion

Topic

Out this week.

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Not sure whether there’s enough activity on the boards these days to support a dedicated spoiler thread, but since the review embargo is about to lift and spoilers will be flying around soon, I thought it might be worth trying to contain them here.

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Todd

[Martin Smith]

Midlife crises on finite earths.

So this was… good? Pretty good. Weirdly, I would say its biggest problem is that it’s too meta. There’s no subtext to any of the plot, which there could be, because the irreverent fourth wall breaking is so on the fucking nose it all becomes text, which does the film a disservice.

And yet there’s a lot to like here. It’s really a final hurrah for pretty much all the non-MCU Marvel films (except Ghost Rider and Man-Thing, I guess), giving a quick breath of life to those to say goodbye. Which again is slightly undermined by the film bludgeoning you with its intent there, but it’s still fun.

(I need to see a BTS thing of Reynolds and Snipes meeting for the first time since Blade: Trinity though, given they did not get on during that at all).

So yeah, funny, decent plot and some good characters but the script feels too dumbed down really.

• This reply was modified 4 months, 2 weeks ago by Martin Smith.

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Uncle Retrospective

I felt it was pretty uneven and took a long while to get going, lots of faffing about the details of the plot (which felt like it was scribbled on the back of a fag packet), and also the Deadpool routine feels a bit familiar and predictable now. And as a whole it felt weirdly small-scale and limited in a lot of ways, despite the multiversal scope.

But despite all that I thought Jackman was great (especially when he got the chance to actually act rather than just react), there were lots of fun little moments, and I like that instead of being about the MCU it actually ends up being a love letter to everything that came before that and effectively paved the way for its success.

I’m also impressed how niche they went with some of the references, especially the whole bit with Gambit (maybe the most cartoonish performance yet in a Deadpool movie.)

Also, I thought the woman who played Cassandra Nova was pretty good and would have been a solid villain in a regular X-Men movie.

I enjoyed lots of individual elements, and laughed a bunch, yet still felt underwhelmed for most of the movie.

Weird that for all the talk of this being Deadpool in the MCU, the only scene set in the actual Marvel Cinematic Universe is the Jon Favreau scene at the very start which was completely pointless and doesn’t connect to anything at all in the movie.

I expected it to end with Deadpool and friends being brought into the MCU, post-Secret Wars style, but nope. Everything’s back how it was, just with Logan and Laura there too.

Making the movie about Deadpool’s love for his friends and wanting to save them would work better if his friends got literally anything to do in the movie. Aside from Peter, they’re all basically just in that party scene and get maybe one-two lines each. We never even get a good look at the photo he’s carrying around. I assume they spent all their cast budget on the FOX all-stars and couldn’t afford to film anything with Karan Soni, Brianna Hildebrand, etc. I completely forgot that Shatterstar even existed.

Also, this movie overdoes all the Peter stuff. I like Rob Delaney, and enjoyed the joke of the character in the last movie, but the “everybody loves Peter” bits in this didn’t work for me at all, particularly when he kept showing up at the end.

I did like seeing all the FOX folk again (or for the first time for Gambit). I just watched Elektra for the first time, and her appearance here helps me forgive how awful that movie is.

Emma Corrin has fun as Cassandra Nova, up until the third act where they have nobody else to act against, are just doing CGI shit, and it sucks. I really hated the whole final setpiece, especially after the fun of the many Deadpool fight.

Matthew Macfadyen didn’t work for me as a villain either, he just seems like an asshole who’s only there to provide exposition and move the plot along without any actual character.

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Martin Smith

paul f wrote:

Weird that for all the talk of this being Deadpool in the MCU, the only scene set in the actual Marvel Cinematic Universe is the Jon Favreau scene at the very start which was completely pointless and doesn’t connect to anything at all in the movie.

I also didn’t really understand how it worked story-wise. Was that ‘our’ Deadpool or a multiversal variant? If it was ours, how/why did he get to the MCU in 2018?

There was lots of slightly nonsensical plot stuff like that which I just ignored in favour of the fun bits.

Yeah, it makes no sense that Deadpool interviewed with Happy (or that Happy was taking interviews for Avengers even). And that kinda epitomised my issue with the overblown meta aspect of the film this time around. There’s a difference between Wade knowing he’s in a movie and making wry asides and commentary about it vs building the entire plot around a thinly veiled (heck, not even veiled) desire to move the characters from the ebbing Fox continuity into the main Marvel continuity, let alone that desire being Wade’s.

I do wonder how much of the audience for Deadpool knows, let alone cares, about the distinction between Fox and Disney movies.

Martin Smith wrote:

I do wonder how much of the audience for Deadpool knows, let alone cares, about the distinction between Fox and Disney movies.

I thought that about all the Gambit stuff too, fuck knows what casual audiences made of all that.

Was the guy in the red and white striped top in Cassandra’s forces supposed to the Russian from the Thomas Jane Punisher movie btw? He was played by Kevin Nash originally, who I don’t think is well enough to shoot a movie. The new guy didn’t look much like him, but seemed oddly distinctively costumed compared to the rest and it’s weird he did more than, say, Deathstrike and that one from Last Stand who was maybe Psylocke or Arclight.

Honestly there were a bunch of characters in that group who I assumed were generic goons but could well have been specific references, we just got so little chance to see them. I didn’t even realise there was a Deathstrike or a Bullseye in there until I heard about it after I saw the movie.

Bullseye was in there? I spotted Deathstrike in one shot when they first go there, but presumably she was in the big fight too. It’s as much a damning indictment of the awful costume design of that period more than anything.

I thought it was an enjoyable watch and even though I’ve been over Reynolds whole shtick for awhile now, I still laughed a lot during it. Jackman is reliably great as Wolverine, but I did think the story was essentially a bland version of the Logan plot. An old and jaded Logan that’s traumatised by the death of the X-Men, that learns to be a hero again thanks to X23🤷‍♂️.

I genuinely though i missed something at the end, because for all the talk about this being Deadpool in the MCU and farewell to the Fox universe..Well, it’s not. He’s in the MCU for like 5 minutes in a scene that really makes no sense. Why does he want to be an Avenger in the first place?. They’re not even from his universe. And then he ends the movie still in his Fox universe..It was very odd.

I was surprised by my lack of nostalgia for the whole thing really. When Chris Evan’s first showed up and I thought he was an alternate Cap, I wasn’t really that moved by it. And then when he turned out to be Johnny Storm, I just thought “ Well, that’s that big potential Secret Wars Cap return moment ruined then🙄”. Although I did think it was funny when he went full Denis Leary in the post credit scene.

And the whole “sad” Green Day thing at the end doesn’t really stir up much emotion when most of the movies featured in were a bit shit to begin with. It’s like all the people trying to pretend the Amazing Spider-Man movies were good all along when Garfield popped up in No Way Home.

Seeing Snipes as Blade was cool, but that line about him being the only Blade was just an odd thing to have when your actively developing another Blade movie.

So it was enjoyable but I still don’t think the Multiverse can be done justice to in live action. They’ve show they just dont have the scope to make it as big and exciting as it needs to be to really sell it the way comics and animation can.

With Secret Wars coming in a few years, it feels odd that they’ve already done the “characters fighting for their timeline to survive” thing here. Is this timeline just going to be wiped out in a few years anyway? And should I care?

Honestly, I hope they just announce at SDCC tonight that they’re scrapping the whole Secret Wars/multiverse thing altogether. Probably not.

The only dangling plot thread I can think of is Monica ending up with the X-Men at the end of Marvels.
Loki tied the Kang story up quite well for me, so I don’t see why they’re locked into this course of storytelling. Although i imagine they’ll take this movies box office as a sign that they should just push on regardless.

paul f wrote:

Honestly, I hope they just announce at SDCC tonight that they’re scrapping the whole Secret Wars/multiverse thing altogether. Probably not.

Sounds like they’re doubling down on it if anything.

Ian Smith wrote:

Seeing Snipes as Blade was cool, but that line about him being the only Blade was just an odd thing to have when your actively developing another Blade movie.

Well it’s meant to be a joke at his expense isn’t it – Deadpool gives a look to the camera that would be a knowing eyebrow raise if he didn’t have the mask on. But it lands differently given Marvel’s apparent inability to make a Blade movie.

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Christian, Todd

“Deadpool & Wolverine” smashes R-rated record with $205 million debut, 8th biggest opening ever

I enjoyed it a lot. It was fun and entertaining. I think the villains’ plots were a bit underbaked but still okay.

Was it perfect? No. Was it a lot of fun? YES!!!

Finally saw this and yeah, it was very enjoyable but not exactly captivating. It’s just a sequence of gags, cameos and action sequences and while all of that is quite well done, there’s no plot or character journey to speak of (yes, Wolverine and DP supposedly do have their journeys, but they don’t really connect because it’s all very superficial).

That said, it’s just a fun movie to watch and even one I might rewatch at some point. There’s a lot of great moments.

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Todd

Watched this and yeah, it’s OK. It’s not the miraculous second coming of the MCU that web chatter suggests, but it’s fun enough, with some excellent high points

Biggest weakness was the TVA by far. I just don’t like that concept. Even this being a rogue part of it doesn’t make it fly for me.

Blade, Gambit and Elektra were fun. Nova was an OK villain.

High point is easily the fight with the 100 Deadpools. Some very clever shots in there, all set to Like a Prayer. A close second is the tour of Logan variants – spotted both Age of Apocalypse and Old Man Logan in there.

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Todd, Dave