For all that's to be said about the future of Marvel, let's first talk about the present. Deadpool & Wolverine plain and simple; is the most fun a Marvel movie has been in Phase 4 or Phase 5. That is about the extent of what it's got going for it, probably because that was the vision all along. Make a crowd-pleaser, get a crowd-pleasing director who has no visual style of his own, get every college dude's answer to 'Hottest Man Alive 'to play the protagonist, and throw some Wolverine in there for the rest of the piggies.
The movie you see on screen is precisely what Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy wanted you to see, something that can't really be said about other recent Marvel properties. All Phase 4 movies had auteurs that had to be pigeonholed into the Marvel Machine and never really got to make the movie they wanted. So it makes sense why the Studio would go for someone who is, for all intents and purposes— a hired gun for a director —when in dire need of a win at the box office. The film is a gluttonous compilation of every cool thing you have seen in the MCU, the Fox X-Men movies, and, much to my chagrin, even a little Star Trek. All that was retooled and retold, with minimal story to wrap it in.
It's made to play for hoots and hollers, and that's precisely what they got. It works exactly like they want, but is that good? Not just as a movie, but is that even good for the future of the Studio? How prudent is it to rely on your viewers to have read the article about Channing Tatum's cancelled Gambit movie? Are teenagers even aware of the existence of 2003's Daredevil? Is it worth pissing off a 2x Academy Award Winner in Mahershalla Ali with sly digs about the hell his Blade movie is going through? This is all information someone deep in the Marvel weeds would know, but if a movie's on track to make a Billion Dollars, it's probably not all out of the nerds' pockets. A compilatory re-mix of 25 years of pop culture all but guarantees to cover as wide of an audience base as possible, but it also wholly obviates the interest your core fans have to continue watching future projects. Why would I, someone who has cared very deeply about all of this since its inception, have any further interest in watching if all I'm getting is a re-mix.
The most confounding part about this movie is that there is an excellent Hugh Jackman performance at the centre of it. He gets two monologues, one absolutely berating Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool and the second a heartfelt tell-all about his past to Dafne Keen, who reprises her role as X-23 and absolutely kills it. What makes this all the more bizarre is that every other character in the movie ranges from horrible to bad. Reynolds' schtick already wears pretty thin on me, so it's not a surprise that him turning it up to 11 with dialogue that sounds like it was on a Reddit forum a few weeks ago wasn't my favourite part of the movie. Emma Corrin, who I loved in The Crown, plays Cassandra Nova, Charles Xavier's dead-in-the-womb twin. It would be cool if the writers knew what to do with this character's backstory, powers, motivations, or other important character stuff. For 2/3rds of the movie, she is motivated purely by making all in the desert- the refuge called The Void- subservient to her, and then she proceeds to let our protagonists escape. Now, suddenly, it's all about destroying everything but The Void. To allow us to get retooled GOTG 'let all hold hands and save our universe with the power of friendship' moment.
Despite all of this and the cognizant ignorance of developing any characters from the creatives, the movie has some incredible action, something Shaw Levy, to his credit, has a knack for. 2011's Real Steel has some of the best robot-on-robot action you'll see, and some of the set pieces in Deadpool & Wolverine have fantastic choreography. Then again, in a bid to drain the creativity from the set pieces, they are all set in the most uninspiring and simply poor-looking environments. It's a film that is so hell-bent on looking back at Fox Studios' past it completely fails to acknowledge the narrative of its present. It's almost fitting that Marvel's most successful venture after the Infinity Saga is also entirely skippable as a story.