Deadpool is offered a place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by the Time Variance Authority, but instead recruits a variant of Wolverine to save his universe from extinction.

I’ve checked out on Marvel recently and haven’t seen all of the recent movies, so ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is the first to tempt me back in for a year or so. The ‘Deadpool’ movies stood alone from the MCU anyway and were made by Fox alongside a lot of the other ‘X-Men’ movies (a reference that is made repeatedly in this movie), and I quite liked the first two, particularly as they seemed to take a different tack to other superhero movies being released. In this third ‘Deadpool’ movie, he is joined by Wolverine, who of course most will remember **spoiler alert** dying at the end of ‘Logan’ several years ago now. Not that dying is a problem for Marvel at all these days, with that big multiverse thing and all the countless variants of each character in different universes. The premise centres on a rogue unit of the TVA (Time Variant Authority), led by a smarmy Matthew Macfadyen, attempting to destroy Deadpool’s world, unless he can bring Wolverine back from the dead – hence ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’.

There’s a curious issue at the centre of ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ that primarily comes from how it relentlessly pokes fun at the laziness of recent Marvel movies, but doesn’t realise it’s quite lazy in its own right and is also reliant on the same multiverse plot device as virtually every other recent Marvel movie or TV series. I’ve talked in my last few Marvel reviews about how the lack of jeopardy is becoming a big problem and this movie only reinforces how they’ve tied themselves in knots with a setup that people are increasingly tuning out of and no one seems to know how to write themselves out off. In the case of this movie it is actually pretty enjoyable and I laughed a lot, which is what you really come to a ‘Deadpool’ movie for. Hugh Jackman is a good foil for Ryan Reynolds, there are plenty of fun cameos and some gonzo over the top violent action sequences set to pop classics. There are also A LOT of references to other comic book movies and if you’ve not exhaustively seen every Marvel and X-Men movie then I dare say things will go over your head as much as they did mine.

I can’t say the plot was anything worth writing home about and as I mentioned above, it suffers from the same lack of originality that it is poking fun at, but it did make me laugh a lot, sometimes quite hard, and I probably enjoyed it more than this review might suggest!

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Shawn Levy

Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, Dafne Keen, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Garner, Wesley Snipes and Matthew Macfadyen

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6263850/