Aug 28, 2024

Deadpool and Wolverine - a crew of thousands


X marks the spot


The latest in the MCU saga, this movie about intercourse between parallel timelines with a procession of masked and costumed super heroes of American comic book lore is not so much a narrative as an echo chamber. 

Which is to say that it is an entity in dialogue with itself. It is chock full of in-jokes such as the film studio Fox being sold to Disney which has revived the saga (aka franchise). There are many other references lost on me because I am not a participant in the echo chamber - and probably in the movie going minority as this film is one of the top grossers of all time with box office success around the globe. A lot of folks like Deadpool and a lot of folks like Wolverine so on the basis that not all of them are the same, there is box office bonanza in combining the two.

The film however is not so much a movie as a report on the state of the super hero world circa now. How they feel, what they are up to, what happened to some of the others. People care about that sort of thing even if, or perhaps because it is, a fantasy which has little relationship to contemporary reality. That is one excuse to make this film which appears to have been written by four people one of whom is the film's star (there may have been more writers, given the development process in Hollywood, and especially if one studio is being absorbed into another which always leads to re-thinks, fall-outs etc). The net effect of all of this is a flat, uninspired, inward looking "narrative" which attempts coherence while indulging action effects. 

I have nothing against this and I am sure one can make psychoanalytical probes into the tests of muscularity, manliness, prowess without the usual macho posturing that underpin the film. And the mirroring of say Deadpool in a parade of timeline Deadpools (sorry you'd have to watch the film to understand this description) attempts a spaltung worthy of Freud. But all this is bye-the-bye because Deadpool and Wolverine at its core seems to lack some kind of organising principle beyond the need to demonstrate Dolby's rendition of its sound mix (which is quite good), and the insistence that thousands of eyes and hands are needed to create elaborate effects that blink past in a few seconds.

But maybe that is cinema - the product of a huge effort by a crew (not cast) of thousands in the service of a thought. Now that is a luxury product.