As Deadpool jokes several different times over the course of Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is experiencing "a bit of a low point" since the massive success of Avengers: Endgame. Fortunately, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is here to shake things up by joining the MCU and making things weird, right? Maybe not, because Deadpool & Wolverine is just an R-rated version of a bog-standard modern Marvel flick: It's pretty funny, the story centers around the same CGI macguffin stuff as always, the third act is utterly baffling and feels like a bunch of stuff was cut, and there are ultimately no meaningful plot connections to the MCU. Standard stuff for the last five years of this franchise, and a major disappointment for the only MCU movie on the 2024 calendar.
Not that Deadpool & Wolverine is awful. It's got several great bloody action sequences, including an opening bloodbath set to NSync's "Bye Bye Bye," and when it's funny, it's really funny. But, just like with Deadpool 2, Deadpool & Wolverine is strangely full of earnestly emotional scenes that don't track at all next to all the silly, fourth-wall-breaking wisecracks, and now we get the added bonus of an overly complicated MCU story that requires far too much explanation despite actually being razor-thin.
Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool and Wolverine
The setup for Deadpool & Wolverine is basically Deadpool's version of the Loki series. He's pulled out of his reality by the Time Variance Authority--folks from outside of time who keep the timelines straight--and brought to Paradox (Matthew MacFadyen). Paradox tells Deadpool that his home universe is dying because it lost its "anchor being," Wolverine--this is meta humor about Logan being by far the most popular of the X-Men, how the franchise didn't work without Hugh Jackman, and the MCU subsuming Fox's Marvel franchises after the merger with Disney. Paradox offers to let Deadpool join the Avengers if he'll help accelerate the destruction of his home universe. There's never any discussion about what Paradox actually wanted him to do, though, as Deadpool rejects the offer and takes his own path by hopping across the timelines to find a new Wolverine, and then the two of them end up stuck at the end of time for most of the movie.
