No

“Deadpool and Wolverine” feels like homework. It’s an action comedy which rarely delivers on exciting action sequences and isn’t nearly as funny as the previous two installments in the series.

The anticipation for this film has been building for nearly two years since Ryan Reynolds announced the return of Hugh Jackman in a brief YouTube video back in Sept. 2022. As someone who has seen most MCU entries and grew up on 20th Century Fox X-Men and X-Men-adjacent movies, I was alongside millions of Marvel-ites in hype for this movie.

But I couldn’t have been more disappointed. “Deadpool and Wolverine” directly tells its audience that the film is supposed to be a fun, rollercoaster-like send-off for an era of superhero schlock that many fans adored.

There are references to Wesley Snipes’ 1998 “Blade” movie, Jennifer Garner’s 2005 disaster “Elektra,” and dozens of other X-Men movies. But with each of these big cameos and guest stars, Deadpool remarks about how lazy or stupid they are.

There’s a running joke about how silly it is to have 55-year-old Jackman still playing Wolverine, but the film ends with heavy set-up to insinuate that more adventures with Reynolds’ Deadpool and Jackman’s Wolverine are imminent.

Much of the other humor in the film is strangely obsessed with the recent 20th Century Fox-Disney buyout. “Deadpool and Wolverine” is a Disney-produced movie, and the fact there are so many jokes at the expense of a now dissolved film studio feels incredibly tone-deaf to me.

Watching a theater of people laugh at a joke about how annoying Fox was and how happy Deadpool feels to be with Disney felt sort of dystopian to me, like we’re cheering for our favorite mega-corporation that beat the other mega-corporation in battle.

That may be too cynical a read, but the whole film feels like this. Dystopian. It’s a series of poorly captured and choreographed action scenes split up by dreadfully dull scenes of exposition and occasional cameos.

Cameos are a staple of Marvel movies at this point, but the choices for who to highlight in this film are confounding to me. Channing Tatum shows up as fan-favorite X-Man Gambit briefly. It’s a reference to an unmade X-Men spinoff that got cancelled a decade ago, a callback that only people ingrained in the conversation around this series would understand.

At its center, “Deadpool and Wolverine” represents a problem in the industry: The conversation surrounding film culture is becoming the film culture. When everything is a reference, callback or rehash, is anyone really creating?

Is “Deadpool and Wolverine” the 100th watchable, “turn your brain off and have fun” blockbuster in a long lineage of fan-favorite box-office smashes? Yes. But don’t we deserve better?

Yes

It is no secret that several of Marvel’s recent movies have been receiving less-than-stellar audience reviews. Many superhero fans have found these new projects lacking in quality, and some have even felt that the genre as a whole is beginning to grow stale.

While I don’t disagree in that assessment, I do believe that “Deadpool and Wolverine,” Marvel’s latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a fun and entertaining movie that does a good job at bringing wisecracking mercenary Deadpool back to the big screen.

One of the best things about this movie was the interactions between Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine — the two titular characters.

Deadpool, as always, brings his signature brand of humor, cracking jokes and breaking the fourth wall throughout the entire movie. I often found myself laughing while he was onscreen and enjoying the meta jokes sprinkled throughout the runtime — especially those aimed at Marvel and Disney.

And, even behind the humor and jokes, there were hints of a deeper character who existed beyond the mask.

Jackman as Wolverine also doesn’t disappoint, as he brings a lot of the more serious moments to the film through his backstory and his quest to no longer be the “worst” version of Logan. He and Deadpool may not always get along — and in fact do fight multiple times — but they make one hell of a team when untied.

Seeing these two indestructible heroes come together to beat up bad guys is just plain fun.

But it wasn’t just the main heroes who made this movie worth watching. There were many moments throughout the film where the audience around me erupted in cheers, mainly when some beloved 20th Century Fox characters made their MCU debut on screen.

For “Deadpool and Wolverine,” Marvel provided audience with fan service. These moments hint at the future of the MCU and perhaps promise more entertaining movies to come.

While “Deadpool and Wolverine” is by no means a cinematic masterpiece, it does serve as a fun Marvel movie, which is something the company has been sorely lacking in for the past few years.