I just got home from watching Deadpool & Wolverine, and yeah... it was pretty fucking good.
Maybe it's not quite as good as the first one. The first Deadpool benefited from that tight focus on Wade and his desire to get back to Vanessa, with only a minor nod to the wider X-universe, so we got more of the unfiltered Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. This could be good or bad, depending on how much you like Reynolds, but it feels like it was the breakthrough role for him, in that his public persona then became Deadpool.
But if this one is a bit more sprawling and laden with references, and the jokes about Deadpool fucking Wolverine get old after a while, it's also a fun movie in its own right. The first thing to note is that the references, in the form of Marvel Multiverses, are part of the movie's grand joke. The wasteland that Wade and Logan find themselves in features not only the 20th Century Fox logo, following Disney's acquisition a few years ago, but also various characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. I guffawed pretty loudly when Chris Evans's character in this sequence was revealed to be not Captain America, but the Human Torch.
(Incidentally, per the expletive-laden post-credits scene, I couldn't shake the feeling that Chris Evans was really enjoying playing against the Boy Scout type that he's played since 2011 as Cap)
All the Multiverse stuff was used well here, to poke fun at the way the concept's been used. The main joke delivery mechanism was Channing Tatum as Gambit, whose lines all talk about forgotten characters or those "who didn't get a chance", which is surely a reference to the Gambit movie that was in development but never came to pass. At any rate it was good to see Gambit doing his thing on the big screen.
Along the way we get to see a bunch of versions of Logan, from the one that's close to his height in the comics, to the Age of Apocalypse version, to a version played by Henry Cavill (who I think would make a good Cyclops - if we discount Matt Bomer). We also get a bunch of different versions of Wade, and they all get massacred in hilarious and satisfying ways, even if they get better because of Wade's healing factor. I also appreciated Wade's fourth-wall breaking plea to stop using the Multiverse as a gimmick, though I suspect Marvel's not going to listen to that plea.
Another thing that made me happy about this movie was the presence of X-23, as previously seen in Logan. I know we saw her in the final trailer, but I was still worried that she appeared as a flashback or a character in Logan's head, so it made me happy to see that she wasn't only in that scene, and that she played a key role in Logan's character development for this movie. Since I started reading newer X-Men comics, she's become one of my favorites of the new characters (i.e. the ones introduced since 1993), so it was good to see her, and the actress who played her, Dafne Keen, have those good moments with Logan.
For me, the best thing about this movie, beyond seeing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine in a role that doesn't diminish his last appearance in Logan, was the hard R. Marvel's gotten a lot more violent and sweary since the 1990s, when they couldn't even say hell or damn, but even now, you don't really get to see the effects of Wolverine's claws or Deadpool's swords or Gambit's explosions. This movie didn't pull its punches, either in terms of violence or language, and given the consistent PG-13 tone of the rest of the MCU, I'm not complaining. Though it'd be boring if they all turned into this.
I don't know if there's going to be another Deadpool movie, and I kind of hope not. This does, however, make me feel a little more confident about the MCU accommodating the X-Men, whenever that's going to happen. It's also a nice companion piece to X-Men '97, which kind of kicked off this annus mirabilis for the X-Men - but whereas that was full of loving homages to the old show and to the Chris Claremont comics, this was an irreverent (but still loving) take on the same corner of the Marvel universe. If we can keep an energy somewhere between those two extremes for the MCU X-movies, the future should be bright indeed.
Or as Wade, Logan and Laura say at various points: Let's Fucking Go.
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