I finally broke my theater streak.

I haven’t been to the movie theaters in two years now and I finally broke my boycott to go see Deadpool & Wolverine. Why? Because I wanted to see if movies have gotten any better in terms of people before I consider renewing my Regal card. And have they? Hell no. I’m still kinda considering renewing my card for the next three months because it was a Marvel movie after all and that invites shitheads who can’t stay off their phone for more than two minutes. The people in front of me were kind enough to turn their screen brightness all the way down, but they did shoot me a dirty look after the movie finished when they noticed I had silently moved several seats away.

Stop being an asshole in the theater, people.

Deadpool & Wolverine is admittedly a film I’ve been excited to go see for a few reasons, primarily because I really liked the Deadpool films and also it’s been long enough since my last Marvel movie that the exhaustion has kinda cleared up. When you’re watching numerous films every week six months feels like a lifetime and a half ago. Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool more importantly was written in part by Ryan Reynolds and you know it’s going to be a work of passion. At least more than the other Marvel movies are anyway.

The plot takes place after Deadpool 2 with Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) now working at a used car store with Peter (Rob Delaney) and still living with Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). Deadpool is arrested by the TVA who offer him a place in the sacred timeline at the cost of his timeline being destroyed due to the death of Logan (Hugh Grant) in the film Logan. So Wade betrays the TVA and in a quest to save his own world travels the multiverse to find a suitable replacement Logan for his world.

Deadpool & Wolverine is utterly moronic and that’s what makes it such a great movie. How stupid is it? The movie kicks off with Deadpool tearing apart a group of TVA agents while dancing to Bye Bye Bye.

Deadpool is one of those characters you either love or hate, and I think the biggest surprise for audiences lies in what Reynolds and crew were able to get away with. Expected to his character, Deadpool makes a lot of fourth wall breaking jokes and comments about Disney, Fox, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. Deadpool feels like a mouthpiece for Disney (or some part of it) to apologize for phase 4 which was a complete shitshow and phase 5 which is turning out to also be a shitshow.

Deadpool openly comments about how the multiverse story should be shelved as it’s been a constant miss after miss, while welcoming Logan to the MCU at “kind of a low point.” He’s not wrong as Guardians 3 was a big standout among repeated failure and crashing box office returns. Disney has been scrambling to reconfigure the future of the MCU after the loss of Jonathan Majors and unceremoniously ending the Kang saga early, being forced to pay Robert Downey Jr. lods of emone to come back, and the constant shuffling of future films/shows. This is the last Marvel movie until February 2025’s Captain America: Brave New World, and 2024 still has Agatha All Along debuting in a few days, Eyes of Wakanda, and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman.

What was I saying? Oh yea, Deadpool & Wolverine. The film is hilarious. It would be difficult for any other Marvel film to have the sheer quantity of variant characters that Deadpool has without being exhausting and annoying, but they manage to pull it off anyway. And there are a lot of characters here from past Marvel films including those from 20th Century Fox and films predating the MCU entirely. There’s a whole joke about characters showing up to get the finale they’re finally owed.

And there’s plenty of heartfelt moments to be had with Deadpool and Logan, owing to Wolverine being the “worst” of all of the variants and carrying some heavy emotional baggage with him that we learn about as the movie progresses. Deadpool meanwhile has finally found a group of people that he cares about and wants nothing more than to keep them safe. And cause a lot of mayhem. Thanks to Deadpool and Wolverine both having healing factors we get plenty of scenes of the two of them mutilating each other to a comical degree.

It’s a great movie and I’m aware I haven’t spoken a lot about the plot or the characters, and most of that comes down to not wanting to spoil things. There’s a lot of surprises and twists in the story and it’s best left to just watching it, even if you wait until it comes to Disney+ (or pirate it) to do so.

Rating: A