Deadpool & Wolverine: Maximum Effort
The Merc with a Mouth's MCU debut is nostalgia cinema done right.
While I’ve never considered myself an overly sentimental person, I am a sucker for nostalgia. To wit: I vehemently (albeit respectfully) disagree with my esteemed peers
and that everything about the 90’s actually sucked in retrospect.I can understand, and even mildly sympathize with, this viewpoint; considering the grandiose future we fresh-faced and doe-eyed millennials were promised has not only failed to materialize, but has instead utterly and spectacularly imploded. However, the fact my generation was ultimately sold a counterfeit bill of goods does nothing to diminish my personal enthusiasm for the decade in which I grew up.
For better or worse, nostalgia is the bedrock of modern entertainment. Everything is about reminding the audience of the good old days, when life was undeniably better and the Sun shone irrefutably brighter. You’d think this would make me the premiere consumer of Modern Entertainment Product™. You’d be wrong.
You see, for nostalgia (or anything) to work for me, there has to be a point to it. Nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia is lazy and annoying and cheap. South Park famously deconstructed this phenomenon in the show’s unforgettable Member Berries story arc.
However, much as I love South Park, I’m not here to write about that, or even nostalgia specifically, except for how it relates to what I am here to write about: Deadpool & Wolverine.
If, like me, you came of age during the Before Times: when there was no MCU, with its grand and unified vision, the premiere superhero franchise was X-Men. Sure, the quality of the movies within said franchise was far from consistent: ranging from some of the best comic book films ever made to some of the very worst. However, they will always hold a special place in my heart, and I consider several of them to be better than anything the MCU has thus far produced.
Which brings us back to Deadpool & Wolverine: a film that effortlessly achieves its purpose of merging the two disparate franchises into a single, joint entity. While I can’t get much more specific without veering into spoiler territory, suffice to say that the movie is a comically violent, profane, and (dare I say) tear-jerking joyride down Memory Lane.
If you’re worried the film’s inclusion of Wolverine (after the rather definitive ending of Logan) is just a cheap marketing ploy that desecrates the character’s legacy, rest assured Wolverine’s involvement is both vital and heartfelt. The montage where Deadpool traverses the various timelines to find just the right Wolverine to suit his self-absorbed purposes is worth the price of admission alone. Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds have been finessing their frenemy personas on social media for years now, and their mutual respect for one another results in some positively magnetic (100% platonic) chemistry on the big screen.
Like Spider-Man: No Way Home before it (another movie which played heavily upon nostalgia and relied on a great many cameos to carry its plot forward), Deadpool & Wolverine lovingly plumbs the depths of the Marvel multiverse to produce an oddly warmhearted film, displaying an undeniable respect for these beloved characters and their towering legacies.
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In my defense, good sir, my lack of nostalgia for the 1990s is mostly that decade’s reputation as some sort of cultural paradise where America worked as advertised. My contention is that the 90s is when the cultural rot, the seeds of which were planted in the 1960s or so, began to be noticeable and begin eating away at the fabric of America. Racial tensions, political correctness (what became woke), the degeneracy and trashiness of American culture, rampant and rapacious consumerism, off-shoring which decimated the American working class in the guise of “free trade,” the consistent deliberate denigration of religion and morality from public life, media consolidation, schools declining in quality, awful inner cities, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and so much more . . . all of it either started or ramped up in the 90s. Culturally, it was dreadful, and going back to the 90s would just get us back here again.
Now, the POP culture was pretty damn good up until the middle of the decade. That’s when I noticed things began to get really fake, for lack of a better term. The soul and craft taken out. Everything got really corporate and money-focused the heart was gone. A lot of retreads. Things felt dated right as soon as they came out. But I’m more bearish on the actual culture and less so on the pop culture than my Romanian counterpart.
Still, good post. I’ve heard nothing but good things about that movie.
Keen to see it later this month. I'm down for some silly fun.