It’s more than fair to say I had my reservations going into this movie and I left feeling conflicted. 

On one hand, I admittedly had fun and laughed a lot. Way more than I was expecting to. Deadpool & Wolverine has without a doubt taken on the mantle of the MCU’s most profane and violent movie, fully embracing its R-Raring. But it also functions as a love letter to a bygone era of superhero movies, which I appreciated as someone who has been watching superhero movies ever since I was a kid. I think it fits in pretty well with the other Deadpool movies when it comes to its meta and immature personality. It has enough fan service, references, and cameos to make a nerd’s dreams come true. It has its crowd pleasing fights and action set pieces. Ryan Reynolds steps back into the Merc with a Mouth’s shoes effortlessly. I still don’t know if it was necessary to bring Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine, but it turned out better than I thought it would and Jackman easily gives the best performance here. His rapport and banter with Reynolds is the highlight of the movie. There’s also a playful soundtrack that lends itself well to Deadpool. And the audience I was in certainly had a blast. That energy was infectious 

On the other hand, however, once you get past all of the key jingling, it becomes glaringly apparent that there’s nothing much else here. This is very much a turn your brain off kind of movie, because the more you think about it, the more it starts to fall apart. It feels like it was specifically made to please as many fans as possible and to make as much money as possible, but at the expense of storytelling, which here is thin and lacking in substance. It’s dumb and it knows it, so it over compensates by going overboard with the fanfare and that schtick eventually wears thin to the point of being tiresome. The editing can be messy and the script is filled with monotonous exposition dumps and a lot of telling, not showing. It’s also tonally jarring in the way it handles its irreverent personality and its overly sentimental emotional beats. While many of the jokes did crack me up, there were also more than a few misses that came across as awkward. On top of that, this movie is also visually bland, with flat cinematography and some ugly cgi. The villains have potential, but are unfortunately extremely underutilized. And I just don’t think director Shawn Levy has the sauce that this movie is in desperate need of.

Overall, Deadpool & Wolverine made my younger self happy. If this came out 5 years ago, I probably would have loved it. That being said, my older self saw it as the shallow nostalgia trap it really is. I think for some people that will be exactly what they are looking for from a movie like this. As for others, it won’t work at all. And if you weren’t a fan of the Deadpool movies beforehand, I don’t see this movie making you one. As for myself, I had a good time, but mostly from a surface level point of view. Martin Scorsese once called Marvel movies theme park rides and I found Deadpool & Wolverine to fit that description well. It’s a bombastic and gratuitous theme park ride, albeit an entertaining one.