Drive in Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: Deadpool and Wolverine!
The Drive-In Saturday Tuesday Movie review series is, of course, named after the Bowie song but often has little more than that related to Bowie. For more Bowie, come back tomorrow…
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Movie: Deadpool and Wolverine
Bowie Connection: Before the featured movie, we saw a trailer for Venom: The Last Dance (click to link) featuring a version of “Space Oddity” (hey, that’s something!)
Experience: Beautiful summer night at the Van Buren Drive-in in Dunkirk, New York. We sat in folding chairs outside our car. A little cooler than last week. The stars were vivid and fireflies plentiful. No ice cream, though.
Movie Review: The first thing to know about this movie is that it is a flat-out comedy. This isn’t an Iron Man-style superhero movie with a witty lead actor occasionally throwing out some zingers. This is an endless torrent of dirty jokes, visual displays of excessive cartoon violence, longer-than-cameos from nearly forgotten characters from older superhero movies, and the total, absolute, complete obliteration of the fourth wall. And it works. This was a very funny movie.
As for a plot? There was a plot in there. Actually, the plot will satisfy whoever was left trying to follow every Marvel movie, show, and probably comic book…and the personal lives and careers of all the actors. I don’t check all of those boxes, so some of the gags went over my head. The good news is that the jokes kept coming faster than the characters’ bullets, so, not unlike a Mel Brooks movie, there really isn’t any time to mull a misfire.
Yes, I thought of Mel Brooks. Deadpool and Wolverine is basically a parody, which is what Mel Brooks excelled at. It also reminded me a little of Monty Python because, like Python, the movie was really a strung-together series of scenes that basically give an excuse for a joke, an action sequence, or a cameo (did I mention there are a lot of cameos?).
Beyond all that, there’s little use in summarizing the storyline. That’s not the point. It also isn’t what the movie is actually about. I mentioned that the movie is a parody, and it is. But it isn’t really a parody of superhero movies. It’s a parody of this state we find ourselves in where nothing is real. This is the most postmodern superhero movie that exists. We are repeatedly reminded that we’re watching a movie. It’s hard to get too tripped up about the plot because Deadpool doesn’t allow us to think about the events of the movie within the terms of the movie—he’s doing this because Disney bought the rights from Fox, he’s doing that because it’s what the audience wants, this other thing isn’t happening because it cost too much money (for the moviemakers, not the characters). On the one hand, that’s the joke. And it’s funny. But on the other, it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-theory theme that infuses politics and society—nothing is what it seems, nothing is real, everything is an act, everything is a scam. That’s the real subject of the parody.
Rating: Four unexpected cameos from all-but forgotten characters from earlier superhero movies played by their original actors!