Deadpool & Wolverine (2024, Levy)
NOTE: This is meant to be read in conjunction with my Twisters review.
"I'm definitely gonna be the People's champion, but . . . I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be." - Muhammad Ali
Ring the bell, Deadpool is the People's Champ. And to hear the Merc with a Mouth tell it, he did it his way: irreverently traipsing among desiccated IP with a bit of the old ultra-violence and an occasional wink. He's right, to an extent. Deadpool & Wolverine is the most successful Deadpool movie by a considerable margin. It's funny more often than not: visual gags abound and prey on expectations created from (at least) 16 years of programming. It has a visual style: derivative, yes (and turning to the camera to tell us that fact does not make it any less so; right, reader?), and barren anytime we cut wider than a medium shot--but in tight quarters, animated and fluid and colorful. It breathes life into a once colossal franchise that for at least eight months squirmed on the operating table: in direct contrast to my viewing of Twisters less than a week before, D&W had the audience on its side in a finger snap.
Of course, the reality of its success is obscured by the smokescreen of profanity and cartoon action. D&W is expertly calibrated to fulfill the four-quadrant distribution strategy, destined from conception to make dump trucks of money. The question was never whether it would succeed, Disney starved the diehards long enough for a win to be inevitable, but how much it would succeed and how it achieved that success.
I'll admit to a total lack of interest in this prior to its jaw-dropping opening weekend receipts. I'm not typically a numbers guy, yet developed a passing interest in D&W's financial success because I felt it would mean something for the future of Marvel and American culture at large. I had predicted a $150 million haul for this, but when I heard it made $211 million--the sixth highest opening for any movie ever, and far and away the highest debut for an R—rated movie--I knew I had to see what galvanized audiences to such an extraordinary degree. I think I have an answer.
Quite simply, mirth served with heavy helpings of self-mocking is the entertainment du jour. It is the byproduct of a mass culture that is now created online, i.e., a culture created by people who can instantly see how the entire world reacts to it, which enables it (the culture) to react accordingly. A $200 million dollar movie, however, is not The Life of Pablo: a living, breathing work of art. It is completed and released, and people respond on social media platforms within hours. Therefore, artists build in cleverness as a safeguards against any potential missteps. If I call myself out for doing the wrong thing, I'm allowed to because you're in on the joke.
And while I can lay claim to a moral stance here--that this kind of thing, in toto, is bad for society--I cannot express contempt toward D&W for being a symptom of that issue. It's what we want, or at least have been trained to want by algorithms and the proliferation of snark occurring behind the Deadpool-like mask of anonymity we have online. In a gnarly twist of irony, that very snark inspires enormous sincerity in the audience. Before D&W, I hadn't been in an audience so on board with a movie in years--it gives voice to the average American more than ten Twisters could. It can't tell us how we got here, but it can point us to where we're going: look no further than the Coexist bumper sticker at the end of Deadpool and Wolverine's bout of Car Jitsu.
