The Marvel Multiverse has gone more than a little tonto in recent years. Since Thanos, and the time-breaking solution to his arc, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and WandaVision, and, most pertinently for this movie, the Loki TV series. In the great tradition of the Marvel comic-books that freely invented theories of space-time that could, for instance, allow a handful of different Spider-Men onto the same page, or throw heroes and villains together that should, logically speaking, have no place in the same property, the Multiverse has become an audiovisual cheat code that lets you have the fun you want to have, underpinned by a certain amount of affable technobollocks.

That’s important to understand, going in to Deadpool & Wolverine, not least because of course the indestructible Wolverine, the most reluctant of all the X-Men, finally died at the end of his last movie, and died a hero’s death, nonetheless.

But the combination of various canon comic-book threads to his character, and the technobollocks of the Time Variance Authority, most notably from the recent Loki series, which if you’re new here just means a bunch of trans-temporal bureaucrats with phenomenal power over which timelines thrive and which don’t, means that frankly, you can pick and choose the Wolverine you want, pluck him from one reality and set him down in another, to make him do your bidding like a Barbie with claws. 

If that sounds harsh…boy, are you in for a time. The first act of the movie is Deadpool looking for a viable Logan to drag back to his reality to save it from extinction after Logan dies in the manner we’ve previously seen on-screen. That’s because, surprise, surprise, Logan turns out to have been an “anchor being,” someone so important to the survival of the timeline that with him removed, the timeline will wither and die. Think David Bowie with an adamantium skeleton and you’re there.

Matthew MacFadyen pops up in a glorious, British, fussy bureaucrat role at the TVA – naturally, it’s not too much of a spoiler to tell you he’s a wrong ’un through and through, with plans of his own about how timelines should be pruned. Cue a joyous “Deadpool chasing through dimensions” sequence, where he searches for any Wolverine that will be able to take the place of our dead Logan.

Oh, also, our Deadpool for this movie sells second-hand cars, after trying out for the Avengers and being rejected. So he has issues of his own and a toupee that embodies all of them.

All of which is mostly there for those people who watch the plots of porn movies, in order to assure themselves they’re not just here to get their rocks off by watching cool and beautiful people do things they never will to other cool and beautiful people.

Bottom line, though, Deadpool & Wolverine is utter comic-book porn. Don’t feel bad – you know it’s what you really want. Two of Marvel’s most promisingly violent characters kicking the absolute living, regenerating crap out of each other for mmmmmost of the movie’s run time, with nothing held back, lots of sweet talk from the Merc with the Mouth, and lots of straight-man “I’m gonna kill you now, Bub” growling from Captain Kitty Cat.  

When these two go at it, it’s pure box office gold, while also being funny as hell throughout, director Shawn Levy entirely understanding the assignment, and feeding the base desires of comic-book movie fans, and Deadpool fans in particular, with lots of sass and backflips in among the inevitable, joyous lack of death that comes from pitting two perpetually regenerating maniacs against one another.

But – and this is important – there’s more to this movie than comedy violence porn and a sprinkling of plotline just to justify the whole experience and make sure you can look yourself in the eye the morning after.

There’s actually a whole lot more of both, but anchored to an underlying plot that manages to press the special geek-buttons you never tell anyone about. Characters that have either never got their fair shake at a franchise, or did and somehow managed not to stick the superhero landing, are here, in a way that, once you accept the whole joyously batshit premise of the movie, makes a perfect kind of sense. And, for the most part, they kick ass – or, just occasionally, get turned into piles of dust and bones, but hey, neither of our two heroes can die, so someone has to turn into a pile of dust and bones at some point, otherwise we’d feel cheated – right?

You will whoop when these characters pop up on screen, and acquit themselves better than they’ve ever done before, because, bless you, you’re a slavering comic-book movie fan, and you love a dirty, juicy prime rib of a redemption arc just as much as the next nerd. And if you’re in the market for redemption arcs, Bub, you sit your ass down, because Deadpool & Wolverine has ’em in spades. Did we mention our Deadpool sells cars now? Life for him has gone spectacularly wrong, and he’s even lost the woman whose crazy matched his crazy. He has, above all, missed his opportunity to matter – but he still loves the friends who cluster sadly around him, trying to make his life less of a walking nightmare of mediocrity. Hence his trip into the Multiverse, in an attempt to bring back a Logan who can save his world, and help him feel like he matters again.

And that Logan? Drunk, grief-stricken, weighed down with a vast responsibility for the death of his friends. Y’know, the funnest Logan? Blue and yellow costumed Logan. Judged throughout the movie, both by MacFadyen’s timeline-pruner and the people of his world, as “the worst Wolverine.”

Except of course, you know better. Because blue and yellow Wolverine is pretty much the Wolverine you’ve been waiting decades to see on screen – the Wolverine beyond gritty rewriting, the Wolverine with whom your geeky little heart probably first fell in lurve. And this movie gives him to you down as many barrels as you’ll find in a Deadpool fight scene.

There are, equally gratifyingly, two major climaxes to the movie – one that helps all those characters whose identities we’re not going to spoil for you shine big and bright and get the perhaps-but-probably-not endings they deserve, and the other that not only dips into Deadpool lore and brings up a joyous, gelatinous handful of stuff that’ll make you squee, but gives you the only real ending you’d accept. The one you went into the movie hoping for – the cheesefest one you didn’t think Marvel would allow. Newsflash, Pilgrim – yes, geeks are fundamentally soppier than they make out, but so are the people who make Deadpool movies, so they root around in your soppiest, sloppiest, snot-flowingest of squidgy ending desires, and they serve it up to you just as you want, just as you knew would happen in the best dimension in the Multiverse. 

Caution: batshit macho men on the internet – there will be hand-holding between consenting adult men. We advise you to quit your bitching now or go and find a corner of the Multiverse that cares.

All in all, is Deadpool & Wolverine a joyous festival of comic-book violence, the like of which will blow every Kingsman movie off the charts? Yes, yes it is, and deep down, you want it to be. Is it consistent within the weirdass Multiverse alleyways down which Marvel has skipped lately? Why yes sir, thank you kindly. Does it deliver redemption arcs by the ladleful, while looking straight down the camera and quipping about the lameness of doing precisely that in a total meta-fest? Mais, naturellement. 

Do you care at all that it’s held together with rubber bands, adamantium dipshittery and fan service? Fuck, no! You’re the fan it’s serving, after all. And does the bitching soundtrack deliver all the way down the line? Of course it does, it’s a Deadpool movie.

What you have here is in fact the Deadpool movie you kind of suspected you needed after the last one, but were ashamed to whisper out loud in case anyone thought you were shallow. Come, embrace your shallowness. Come, also, embrace your deepness if you can reach that far or have a pal who can lend a hand. Deadpool & Wolverine has your back, and it’s a festival of unicorns and wonder, with comic-book ultraviolence and redemption arcs up every conceivable wazoo. Tony Fyler

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