Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.At first glance, comic-book caper Deadpool & Wolverine seems like studio logic at its biggest, dumbest and most retrograde. Twelve months ago, Barbie and Oppenheimer had two standalone stories cleverly marketed as a double act. Now, a sceptic would see a pair of aged superheroes, lazily slung together in one migraine-loud package. The film’s selling point is that it would probably agree: this is a Marvel movie of apparently rare candour. (For younger readers, a Marvel movie was a once significant cultural event, big in the 2010s.) Cue the odd-couple crackle of the flip pansexual loudmouth played by Ryan Reynolds teamed with Hugh Jackman’s tortured mutant. That in turn brings intrigue. The last outing for Jackman’s character, Logan (2017), was a doomy, quasi-adult drama that left him doomily dead. To discuss the fix would risk a spoiler. Let us only say that the set-up finds Reynolds’ wisecracking Deadpool single, wearing a toupee and haunted by regret. A world-ending crisis handily presents itself, one also demanding Wolverine’s return. “You’re joining at a bit of low point,” Deadpool remarks. You may snigger, given the recent trials of Marvel, whose output has lately underperformed. Again, the movie is ahead of you. The line comes with a small verbal wink to the mid-life state of the company.Elsewhere, however, the corporate mood is bullish. In two previous Deadpool movies, tireless meta-comedy has been a feature. Here, there are many riffs on the 2019 takeover in which Marvel’s parent Disney bought rival Fox, swallowing up the X-Men franchise of which Wolverine was part, and making this movie possible. This Hollywood Reporter shtick fits the Deadpool blueprint of no fourth wall left standing. Likewise, few pales are not strenuously gone beyond. The character was always the foul-mouthed scamp of the Marvel litter, aimed at the brasher fan. Among the asides about Marvel star Chris Evans’s salary are a battery of jokes about drugs, handbag dogs and vaguely transgressive sex. Three movies in, the cocaine and erections are old news, but occasionally the script seems near an actual knuckle. Your eyes may widen at a gag about Jackman’s recent real-life divorce. The Australian actor is nothing if not game, but the movie belongs to Reynolds. (Literally: he is co-producer as well as star.) The tonal battle between the two characters is a walkover. Between the frenzied slapstick violence and battery of gags, two hours plus pass in a finger click. Of course, there is a joke about excessive running times too.All the same, some realities are too much to bear, at least publicly. If the question every Deadpool film posed was just how coarse and self-referential a Marvel movie could be, the answer here stops short of explicitly quoting Disney chief executive Bob Iger, who has lamented a lack of quality control. (After years of creative incontinence, the film is Marvel’s only release of 2024.)And yet when the story gets around to Wolverine’s former X-Men colleagues, it gives a bittersweet nod to the fate of old superheroes forgotten by the movie business. Deadpool is not there quite yet, but amid the F-bombs and blood spatter, you sense even Reynolds taking comfort in the thought of Hollywood life after death.★★★☆☆In cinemas from July 26
