Having reactivated Disney+/Hulu only a few days ago (in order to watch Daredevil: Born Again with a co-worker and fellow long time DD reader), I only watched Deadpool & Wolverine a couple of days ago. So this is akind of ‘catch up’ response and review.
Martin Smith: “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.”
Todd: “Deadpool & Wolverine” smashes R-rated record with $205 million debut, 8th biggest opening ever.
It was pretty metta: I found myself wondering how this movie made so much money at the box office. It is silly, violent fun. That’s pretty what the Deadpool films have been about, no more, no less. But DP&W was 99% in-jokes for long term comic book fans. Like a badly translated Cantonese comedy, where 99% of the humor is based on homonyms unique to the dialect, the vast majority of the gags would fly over most peoples heads.
Martin Smith: But despite all that I thought Jackman was great (especially when he got the chance to actually act rather than just react),…
Agreed. It’s been so long since I had the patience to sit through an X-Men film (most of which, I must say, i found terribly disappointing) I’d forgotten how much Jackman brought to the character. He really convinces as Wolverine, esp. once this iteration of the character got over his self-loathing and got “into gear.”
Ian Smith: 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.
I never saw the FF film where Evans played Johnny Storm. And from all accounts I didn’t miss much. So I was utterly taken by surprise, first when Evans shows up, and then when it became clear he was the second Human Torch.
Martin Smith: “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.)
Dave: I thought that about all the Gambit stuff too, fuck knows what casual audiences made of all that.
My first reaction was that casting Channing Tatum as Gambit one of the great examples of bad casting I’d ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, I think Tatum can be a very good, even great, actor in the right role (of which I’ve seen very few) but I don’t think he even tried to pull off a convincing Cajun accent. But then a friend who used to work in post-production told me that Tatum had been cast in a never-produced Gambit film ages ago, so it kind of made sense to see him play the role.
Paul F: 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.
Believe it or not, I have a weird, utterly unwarranted affection for the misfire that was Jennifer Garner “Elektra”, but that’s because someone warned me before seeing the film, saying that it was best to watch it as though it had been produced by the Lifetime cable channel for morons, and to forgive (ahead of time) the fact that the major fight scene was the equivalent of one big ‘swipe’ from Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s animated feature film, “Ninja Scroll” (which, if you ever compare the two, they were).
That said, Garner was serviceable in the role.
Ian Smith: 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.
For me, seeing Wesley Snipes play Blade again, reminded me of how great he was (really great) as the Nightwalker, in those first two Blade films. No offense to academy award winner, Mahershala Ali (who hasn’t yet had the chance to play the role), but whatever one says about Snipes, his Blade remains a definitive portrayal in my opinion, however it differed from the version that I first loved in the Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan/Tom Palmer run on “Tomb of Dracula”, where he was originally intended to be little more than a stand-in for the deceased Quincy Morris among the 20th Century descendants of the original Dracula-hunters from Bram Stoker’s original novel: Quincy Harker, Rachel Van Helsing, Frank Drake, etc.
Snipes Blade was utterly, unapologetically badass.
(I really hated the third Blade film, “Blade: Trinity”, in large part because, as a fan of the Marv Wolfman/Gene Colan/Tom Palmer run on “Tomb of Dracula”, I really hate what Marvel and the movies have done with the original conception of Hannibal King, the vampire detective. His first appearance, in ToD, Vol.1, No.25, and his subsequent team up with Blade to finally take down Deacon Frost, are among the best issues in that fantastic run.)
Paul F: 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.
I thought Emma Corrin was a wonderful Cassandra Nova. She brought a kind of playfulness one expects from say, Emma Frost (something we definitely did not get from January Jones’ Emma Frost, in Matthew Vaughan’s “X-Men: First Class”) something that raises the level of threat that the character represents. I’d love to see Corrin play the character again.
Paul F: 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.
Hmm, I differ there. MacFadyn’s turned in a serviceable performance as the self-serving TVA bureaucrat here. (Which isn’t saying too much, given how one-dimensional the character was.) I haven’t seen McFadyn in anything else. (People have spoken well of his role in HBOMAX’s recently concluded, “Succession”, a show I didn’t follow, so I can’t say more about the man as an actor.)
I admit I’m kinda’ worried about the news that he’s been cast to play John LeCarre’s George Smiley (for some reason, LeCarre’s descendants do not want to see Gary Oldman reprise the role) in future productions based on the great spy novelist’s work. Our loss. I think four or five actors have played the role, and until Oldman, no one did as good a job as Alec Guinness, in the early TV series based on “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Smiley’s People”.
Paul F: 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.
“Logan” was one of the few Fox X-Men films I’ve seen that I didn’t think was an utter waste of my money, and the studio’s money, and I thought Dafne Keen did a great job as the young Laura Kinney; so I liked seeing her reprise the role some seven or eight years later, and she did a perfectly good job with the few lines/few scenes she had. I’d love to see her reprise the role sometime, now that she’s a young adult.
Ben: 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.
No question: like a hallway fight in an episode of the Netflix Daredevil series. Best sequence in the film.
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