At the same time, the film maintains the loose-verging-on-chaotic, sketch comedy-derived sensibility that links it to slapstick from the early sound era of motion pictures. Wolverine and Logan are nigh-invulnerable cousins of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby riffing their way through the long-running “Road” series, which regularly paused to bond with the audience over watching a movie. They’re also Moe and Curly in super-suits. Their eye-pokes go through the sockets and into the brain.
Somehow, despite the silly mayhem and hyper-meta goofing, I kinda did care about the characters, especially in the finale, which unspools a pathos firehose and blasts us with it. Jackman is moving as Wolverine – and always has been; arguably more so the older he gets. Here he plays, not the straight man, but the exasperated, cranky man. He yells not just because he’s had enough of this red-suited clown but also because he’s furious at himself for failing and now has a target at which to direct his accumulated negative energy. Reynolds, for all his blabber-mouthed, abrasive relentlessness, is touching as well, probably because in this version of the characters’ stories, they’re both broken, abandoned men: “losers,” Wade calls them. Their loser-ness connects to the idea of the Fox-Marvel characters ending up collateral damage in a long running corporate rivalry that concluded with one combatant annexing and pillaging the other.
I wish the movie were more coherent and consistent. The visual effects are of variable quality. Some of the closeups are luminous and the colors radiant, particularly in night scenes, while other shots (particularly daylight panoramas in the limbo sequence) are so flat-looking and washed out and devoid of detail that they wouldn’t pass as a screensaver. Director Shawn Levy– a regular Reynolds collaborator who’s comfortable with CGI-driven, big-budget projects – handles the action competently but without jaw-on-the-floor inventiveness (though he does have a comedy storyteller’s knack for timing the verbal and visual gags, and there’s a nifty “Oldboy” tribute). This is the second “Deadpool” in a row where Wade is driven mainly by a desire to do right by Vanessa even though she’s barely in it. (His narration does, however, confess to getting a stiffie while watching “Gossip Girl,” which starred Reynolds’ wife Blake Lively.) The movie is tight by superhero standards (127 minutes) but still runs out of gas. Wade admits it, though, promising to wrap things up when you start to fidget.
There are compensations, particularly in the casting. MacFayden serves tasty ham in the Shakespeare-trained Brit tradition. Corrin, who played Princess Diana in Netflix’s “The Crown,” makes a frightening villain, with her predatory stare, bird-boned arms and legs, and long, elegant fingers. The movie pushes some of Cassandra’s torturous or murderous acts to the point where they seem like spiritual as well as physical violations. When this woman gets in your head, it’s not a metaphor. (Between the profanity, the gore, and the sadomasochistic bent, this entry is as not-for-kids as the others.)