Deadpool & Wolverine puts two men who cannot stand each other in a room and lets them fight for 128 minutes. That is the whole engine, and it works more often than it stalls.
Shawn Levy directs from a screenplay he wrote with Ryan Reynolds, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Zeb Wells. The film is the 34th entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the sequel to Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018). Produced by Marvel Studios, Maximum Effort, and 21 Laps Entertainment, and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Tagline: “Come together.” The movie mostly earns it.
Trailer, via Marvel Entertainment.
Wade Wilson Sells Used Cars
Wade Wilson has quit. When the film opens, he is no longer the masked mercenary Deadpool, no longer dating Vanessa Carlysle, and working as a used-car salesman with his friend and former X-Force member Peter Wisdom. He is, in the film’s own framing, listless. The wisecracking has not stopped. The purpose has.
Wade has accelerated healing and severe scarring over his body after undergoing an experimental regenerative mutation to treat terminal cancer. The scars are the point. Wade is a man whose body was rebuilt into something he did not ask for, and who has spent two films joking his way around that fact. Here the jokes land on a man who has stopped moving.
Writer Rhett Reese described Deadpool as a fish out-of-water — a lunatic dropped into the “sane world” of the MCU. That is the correct read, and it is the film’s best structural idea. Wade does not belong in this franchise. The movie knows it.
The TVA Comes for Earth-10005
The plot turns on a bureaucratic threat, which is a smarter choice than a bigger one. Wade is detained by the Time Variance Authority, an organization outside of time that monitors the Sacred Timeline and the wider multiverse, and brought before Mr. Paradox, played by Matthew Macfadyen.
Paradox explains that Wade’s universe, Earth-10005, is deteriorating because its stabilizing “anchor being,” Logan, has died. He offers Wade a future on the Sacred Timeline. Wade accepts — until Paradox reveals he plans to use a “Time Ripper” device to speed the collapse along. Wade steals the TemPad and runs.
What follows is a grave robbery, a multiverse search, and a bad hire. Wade cannot resurrect Logan, so he goes looking for a replacement variant and comes back with the worst Wolverine in the multiverse. Paradox tells him an anchor being cannot be replaced, especially not by this one. When Wade works out that Paradox is acting without his superiors’ knowledge, Paradox sends both men to the Void, a wasteland at the end of time.
Jackman Plays a Wolverine Haunted by Regret
Hugh Jackman returns as Logan, a mutant and former X-Men member with healing abilities, retractable claws and an adamantium-infused skeleton. This is not the Logan of Fox’s X-Men films. This is a variant from a universe he let down.
Jackman has said Logan and Wade are opposites with a “quarreling dynamic.” Levy has said both characters are “haunted with regret.” The film takes that seriously in one specific way: it depicts Logan’s backstory, including the deaths of his fellow X-Men, through sound design alone. No flashback cameos. No parade of dead teammates. The regret stays Logan’s.
That is a real directorial decision and it is the right one. The film has every incentive to show you the bodies. It withholds them.
Cassandra Nova and the Void
The pair are captured alongside Johnny Storm and taken to Cassandra Nova, the powerful and sadistic twin sister of the X-Men leader. Emma Corrin plays her. Corrin gets the film’s least grateful assignment — a villain who must be threatening in a movie that keeps undercutting threat with jokes — and holds the screen anyway.
The Void also brings back faces from Marvel productions past. Jennifer Garner returns as Elektra, Wesley Snipes as Blade, Channing Tatum as Gambit, and Dafne Keen as Laura / X-23. The film serves as a tribute to Fox’s X-Men film series, and these returns are part of that tribute.
The supporting cast is deep. Morena Baccarin as Vanessa, Rob Delaney as Peter, Leslie Uggams as Blind Al, Jon Favreau as Happy Hogan. Reynolds also plays Nicepool, a variant with no scars and no healing factor, credited as “Gordon Reynolds.”
A Dance Number and a Dancepool
One production note deserves singling out. Deadpool’s opening dance number was performed by Nick Pauley, credited as “Dancepool.” It is the film’s purest joke — a stunt so committed it required its own performer — and it sets the register.
The screenplay is credited to five writers, which usually signals trouble. Here it mostly reads as a comedy room that knew when to stop. Reynolds has said the audience did not have to take Deadpool seriously, particularly with his fourth-wall breaking and unreliable narration, but that he wanted them invested in the other characters. That is the correct diagnosis of the film’s own risk. Wade can wink at the camera. Logan cannot.
What the Film Gets Right
The quarreling dynamic is the load-bearing wall. Jackman and Reynolds are playing two men who have each failed at the thing they were built for, and the film lets that sit without resolving it too fast. Wade’s offer to Logan — that the TVA can change events in Logan’s past — is the film’s best con, because it is a lie Wade tells to get what he wants and a truth Logan wants to believe.
The comedy is relentless, and relentless is not the same as consistent. The film’s weakest stretches are the ones where the jokes arrive because the clock says they should, not because the scene needs them.
But the film’s instincts are sound. It knows Wade is a lunatic in a sane world, and it knows the sane world is Logan. When the two are actually talking — not fighting, not quipping over each other — Deadpool & Wolverine is at its best.
The Numbers
Key facts
- Title: Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)
- Director: Shawn Levy
- Screenplay: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Ryan Reynolds, Shawn Levy, Zeb Wells
- Runtime: 128 minutes
- Genres: Action, Comedy, Science Fiction
- MCU entry: 34th film
- Tagline: “Come together.”
- Score: 7.6/10
- TMDB audience score: 7.6/10, from 9,437 votes
Running order
| Section | What happens |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Wade uses Cable’s time travel device to save Vanessa; travels to Earth-616 and is rejected by Happy Hogan |
| Six years later | Wade has broken up with Vanessa, retired from Deadpool, sells used cars with Peter Wisdom |
| Birthday party | Wade is detained by the TVA and brought to Mr. Paradox |
| The offer | Paradox offers Wade a future on the Sacred Timeline; reveals the Time Ripper plan |
| The theft | Wade steals the TemPad, visits Logan’s grave, searches the multiverse |
| The return | Wade brings back the worst Wolverine variant; both are sent to the Void |
| The Void | The pair are captured with Johnny Storm and taken to Cassandra Nova |
The Verdict on Deadpool & Wolverine
Deadpool & Wolverine is a franchise repair job that turned into something better than a repair job. The MCU needed a film that could absorb the Fox era without pretending it never happened, and this is that film.
The 7.6/10 is the TMDB audience score, drawn from 9,437 votes. That is a strong number for a superhero comedy carrying a TVA multiverse plot and a long list of returning Fox-era characters, and it is the figure to watch when the next Deadpool film is measured against this one. The two leads carry the picture, and the sound-design choice for Logan’s backstory is the sharpest filmmaking decision in it.
What matters here is what the film chose not to do. It depicts the deaths of Logan’s fellow X-Men through sound design alone. It did not make Logan’s grief a spectacle. It let regret be a thing two men talk around instead of a thing the camera lingers on. That restraint is the difference between a tribute and a cash-in.
Deadpool & Wolverine scores 7.6 of 10.
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