Deadpool and Wolverine It has to be the most unlikely Marvel Cinematic Universe film to this day. The reasons are more legion than the son of Professor Xavier and Gabrielle Haller. For almost 20 years, the X-Men – along with Dead Pool It is Wolverine with them — were controlled by an entirely different movie studio, 20th Century Fox. Their Deadpool movies were full of R-rated violence and profanity, both big no-nos in the PG-13 MCU. And even before Wonder bought Fox, star of Wolverine Hugh Jackman announced his retirement as the character and released his superhero farewell, 2017 Loganwhere his X-Man died in no uncertain terms. As a general rule, it’s hard to make a sequel after impaling your title character on a massive tree branch.
But the biggest reason Deadpool and Wolverine What seems so unlikely is: This isn’t Deadpool and Wolverine’s first movie. This crossover has happened before — in one of the worst Marvel movies ever made. The fact that this disastrous initial encounter didn’t spell the end of either character’s on-screen viability, and that 15 years later we’re now getting a sequel anchored by the two of them together, seems more like a long shot than a guy with a blonde mullet and four fingers walking around the Mojoverse.
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That previous crossover movie, of course, is X-Men Origins: WolverineFox’s first attempt to spin off its popular X-Men franchise in the 2000s into a series of prequels and standalone films featuring individual members of its large cast. Given Wolverine’s massive popularity — and Hugh Jackman’s performance in the role — he was the obvious first choice for one of these spinoffs.
Based on the finished film, this was the just obvious choice for director Gavin Hood and the Fox team. The rest of X-Men Origins is filled with bizarre decisions, eccentric casting, and a general mood of creative confusion — as if no one behind the scenes can agree on exactly what kind of Wolverine movie they should make.
Is this a prequel about young Logan before his powers developed? Yes, for a little while. Is this the story of how Wolverine got his adamantium claws? Sure, why not? Is this a solo Wolverine movie about an immortal warrior destined to walk the world alone forever? Oh my God, yes. But is this also movie with lots of mutants anyway because we put the word “X-Men” in the title, and does that mean people will expect to see a team of X-Men types doing superhero stuff? Yes, too!
Can this movie explain where Wolverine got that cool leather jacket he sometimes wears? I mean, that doesn’t seem like something that it needs explaining, but okay? Oh, and we know that Cyclops first met Wolverine in the first X-Men movie, but is there a way to include it anyway, possibly in some sort of blindfolded way so he doesn’t see the guy helping him escape a mutant prison situation? You bet!
X-Men Origins: WolverineThe plot is loosely and at times contradictorily adapted from a variety of Marvel comics, and follows the character from puberty through a century of eternal young adulthood. He discovers his powers during a tragic domestic dispute that leaves him orphaned along with his extremely hairy and pointy brother Victor (Liev Schreiber). Together, Jackman’s Logan and Schreiber’s Victor, blessed with healing factors that essentially make them immortal, fight their way through decades of armed conflict: the Civil War, both World Wars, the Vietnam War — although, as Jackman himself jokes at a later point in the film, Logan and Victor are Canadians and their participation in these wars doesn’t make much sense.
After being captured in Vietnam, a military scientist named William Stryker (Danny Huston) recruits them into his secret mutant strike team. The group also includes sniper Zero (Daniel Henney), electricity-wielding Bradley (Dominic Monaghan), the immobile Fred Dukes (Kevin Durand), teleporter John Wraith (will.i.am) and…smart swordsman Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds).
This team only stays together for one sequence; Logan decides he doesn’t like doing Stryker’s dirty work and leaves. Reynolds’ Wade Wilson disappears from the film completely until the last scene. When he finally returns, Stryker has shaved his head, stitched up his mouth, and somehow shoved katanas into his arms. (How does he bend at the elbow with swords inside his arms?!?) Stryker also gives Wade the powers of several other mutants who have been captured or killed, including Wraith’s teleportation and Cyclops’ optic blasts. Thus, Wade becomes a “Deadpool.”
This is a strange use of Ryan Reynolds and his non-stop quipping persona. It’s also a very strange use of Deadpool, one with little to no basis in the Marvel comics, where he’s affectionately called “The Merc with a Mouth.” What X-Men Origins: Wolverine assumes that… maybe he isn’t?
Even before Deadpool became a mute, mindless killer (whom William Striker remotely controls with a personal computer where he types instructions like “>DECAPITATE<”) X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a structural, visual, and tonal mess. This is a movie where Stryker sends his master marksman Zero to kill Wolverine, but conveniently forgets to give him the adamantium bullets he has lying around for just such an occasion. This is a movie where longtime X-Men villain Blob gets his codename because Wolverine calls him “Bub,” and he confuses “bub” with “blob,” because I think those are two words that kind of sound vaguely alike? This is a movie where Liev Schreiber’s Victor leaps around with animalistic fury, but the wirework used to create his leaps is so bad it makes him look like a child’s dog puppet.
In fact, if you want to get really technical about it, Ryan Reynolds’ first appearance on X-Men movie franchise is when your name appears in the opening credits during one of poor Liev Schreiber’s pathetic and cartoonish attacks.
This wasn’t the most auspicious debut. And yet a great Ryan Reynolds scene might be the only thing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine that actually works. This sequel is short—it lasts about eight minutes—but it takes place seven years before Reynolds appeared in the first Dead Pool movie, he already has his version of the character ready. He’s not wearing his signature costume, but otherwise he’s exactly the same guy who would appear in his solo films.
In a 2016 interviewReynolds blamed X-Men Origins: Wolverineproblems with a script that could not be revised or improved because of a writers’ strike. He also revealed that he wrote all of Wade Wilson’s lines in that scene himself. (The script, he claimed, only stated “Wade Wilson shows up, talks really fast.” He had to fill in the rest himself.) The whole nonsense about shirtless, mouthless Deadpool tasing Wolverine with laser eyes atop Three Mile Island was, in Reynolds’s words, “a last-minute audible.”
(Did I forget to mention that the climax takes place on top of a cooling tower on Three Mile Island? It does!)
The audible turned into a disaster, as these things tend to do, and now that Dead Pool is a full-fledged franchise, Reynolds has made the most of his humble beginnings, both in interviews and on screen. Dead Pool the films themselves. But if you look at just those eight minutes or so that Reynolds appeared as from him version of Deadpool — and you look at the way his loudmouth character stood out from Hugh Jackman’s stoic, irritable Logan — you can see exactly why. Deadpool and Wolverine makes perfect sense. Even if X-Men Origins: Wolverine did not.
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