Dead End: DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

“Welcome to the MCU,” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), the irreverent regenerative mutant with a fourth-wall-breaking power, tells a Wolverine (Hugh Jackman). To this he adds: you’re joining it at a low point. You can say that again. Meant to be a joke about the lower box office and more mixed reception of recent Marvel Cinematic Universe pictures, this movie, the thuddingly obvious Deadpool & Wolverine, is the actual nadir for the whole hydra-headed franchise. Even by Deadpool standards, it is astonishingly witless and empty. It’s a movie with nothing at stake, in which nothing much of consequence happens, and in which every act of violence or feint toward character development is ultimately meaningless. (It doesn’t even, in the end, despite its promises, bring Deadpool or Wolverine into the MCU!) Its tone is typical of its meta-antihero’s: cynical, sarcastic, insincere. But it feels even worse, somehow, shorn from the comparatively more authentic edge of the initial two entries produced under 20th Century Fox. Since that studio was absorbed by Disney, that edge is now queasily subsumed within the sturdy sentimentality and baseline simplicity of the MCU, which continues its project of painting the earlier efforts of Fox (and others) as unsanctioned variants of the Sacred Timeline. That whole concept comes from the largely satisfying TV series Loki, which has some fun with the idea of hopping through time and multiverses. The problem, though, is that one must care about the characters to track motivations across a conceit in which anything is possible and nothing is permanent. And Deadpool is awfully hard to care about as a real character; he’s more of a stunt and a goof at best. It might make sense to pair him as a mismatched partner to Jackman’s Wolverine, whose many film appearances have been tense and tortured; instead it’s a one-note irritation with a wild card bouncing off a stone wall.

Any chance of taking the stakes or characterizations as anything but obnoxious and tedious vanish quickly. The movie opens with a phony sequence in which Deadpool slaughters innocent agents of the Time Variance Authority in gory cartoonish shots of CG gore splattering. He does this while dancing to NSYNC and miming sex acts, stroking a phallic femur he uses to stab an anonymous extra in the gut. Later, he’ll tearfully ask an alternate universe Wolverine to help him save his universe from destruction, since the villains plan to rip it apart after sending him to The Void, where other misfit Marvel castoffs sit around waiting for their cameos. Hard to reconcile those two modes—high-stakes exposition and flat displays of vulgarity and violence—especially when the finale also includes a bloody massacre of alternate Deadpools who are constantly torn apart and regenerated to get up and get dismembered again. Sounds a little clever in concept, but why they’re fighting, and who they’re fighting, never makes sense. They can live forever and exist in every universe. Why do we care about any of them? And the sequence is shot so dispassionately—in a steady, calm, monotonously paced tracking shot—with stunts digitally smoothed that it’s creepy in its total alienation from reality and consequence. Death doesn’t matter here, so what are we rooting for? That action beat starts when a nice character’s head explodes in a spray of bullets because Deadpool is holding him as a human shield, making jokes the whole time. Why should we care if his universe of supporting characters will survive when none of the other characters, or the movie itself, cares about life itself? It’s numbing in its senselessness.

To whipsaw between total adolescent depravity and painfully vacant sentiment almost sounds energetic. But I cannot overstate how deadly dull the movie is from scene to scene. It sparks to life in sputtering spurts, drifting off affection for other, better Marvel properties—from the retro-future TVA offices to previous X-Men finale Logan to appearances from surprise castmates. (One shot of an ersatz Avengers had me dreaming of such a misfit matchup in a better movie.) Director Shawn Levy can be a reliably anonymous technician. He previously pulled off a robot boxing movie with Jackson—2011’s Real Steel—to diverting results, and a video-game meta action comedy with Reynolds—2021’s Free Guy—to some crowd-pleasing effects. And he can traffic cop comic personas well enough in Night at the Museum. But here some combination of the dictates of Deadpool’s juvenile ugliness and the MCU’s polished anonymity, along with his typically flavorless direction, combines to make a broadly repellent mush. The screenplay flops along doing nothing, Jackson's innate Wolverine charisma tries to imbue literally anything of note in the downtime, and the bland images constantly undercut any sense of creativity or cleverness. 

The whole movie is oddly cheap and small, taking place almost entirely in an empty wasteland and on one city street. It says a lot about the movie’s mismanaged sense of its own expectations that it prefaces one particular action sequence with Deadpool asking the nerds to get ready for something awesome and then follows that promise with janky effects awkwardly filmed. The characters may be stranded in a Void, but to sit watching one limp scene after the next flail self-satisfied feels like its own particular purgatorial punishment. It makes constant reference to other perceived Marvel failures—X-Men Origins, a couple Fantastic Fours, Affleck’s Daredevil—and each time the smug superiority of this movie’s tone had me thinking we were too hard on those earlier efforts. At least they were trying to be real movies. Even flashbacks to the first Deadpool, a movie I hated at the time, and probably still would if I rewatched it, look like great cinema compared to this rot.

Home on the Range: HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1

It begins with a massacre and ends with a massacre. Kevin Costner’s return to the director’s chair, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, may be merely the opening of a much longer project—and feels it, baggy with detail and spacious with introductions and set-ups, withholding all payoff for much, much later. But its intentions are already becoming clear. Here’s a movie about American Manifest Destiny: settlers moving west and the indigenous pushed out or pushing back. It’s about the violence it takes to recreate a country in your image; it’s about the hope to uproot one’s life only to replant it elsewhere; it’s about the perseverance to maintain your culture and traditions in the face of those who wish to take it from you. As such, the movie is a sturdy and sentimental work, overflowing with character melodramas played out against the backdrop of the American West. But it’s also a tough and fair story, thus far, and prismatic in the way it turns over the scenarios and sees from multiple perspectives. It opens with a small tent city struggling to become something more—a would-be town called Horizon advertised to settlers back east as a place of potential. The townsfolk are slaughtered by nearby natives, leaving dazed survivors to confront a military man who glumly tells them it’ll happen again. The people on whose land they’re attempting to build will not give it up without a fight. Some settlers want to stay. Some flee to the safety of the nearby army outpost. Soon enough, we meet the natives, and see they too are of split loyalties. A chief chastises a warrior who led the attack. Violence makes them all unsafe, he says. Eventually, this long chapter ends with retribution—a pack of miserable mercenaries slaughter an innocent tribe. And the cycle continues.

Between these two bloody action sequences shot through with the excitement of grief and agitation of injustice, we meet many characters in a huge ensemble, and find a great deal of conflict and rooting interest taking place. There’s the strong widow (Sienna Miller) and her angelic young teen daughter (Georgia MacPhail who, in one scene with all-white wardrobe, underlines her role as a literal manifestation of innocence) taken under the wing of a tender-hearted cavalry officer (Sam Worthington). There are the squabbling tensions of a wagon train under the watch of a tired leader (Luke Wilson) leading them inexorably toward Horizon. There’s a taciturn cowboy (Costner, saving his introduction for over an hour) who becomes suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, invested in the survival of a prostitute (Abbey Lee). She’s stalked by gunmen (with a glowering, pouting Jamie Campbell Bower the most sinister among them) hunting down her friend (Jena Malone), a fugitive who killed their brother—the father of the friend’s child. It’s at once complicated and clear. We start to get a sense of where these stories might go through the conventions of such tales, and the easy rapport the actors build in these characters whose circumstances are historical and dramatic, but shot with a dependable gloss of some more mythic aims. Costner allows for plenty of heroic shots and sweeping landscapes that heighten that larger-than-life feeling as he keeps up a generous pace that’s all rising action. Each sequence is patiently developed in square and sturdy images, sunny and dusty and cut with the grace of a classical engraving. (One character even has a hobby of making sketches for just that purpose.) The film’s playing in the iconographic expected tableau of such an old-fashioned tale, while the complications pile up with the sense that we’re getting somewhere vast and engaging—eventually.

The movie is an expansive, wandering one, content to roll out every kind of Western—historical, pulpy, epic, romantic, bloody, wry—and pile up the tropes of each until they sing anew in a dynamic chorus. Costner is clearly a filmmaker in love with the genre; he’s starred in a few and his entire directorial output is some form of Western—his Dances with Wolves a revisionist take partially from a native perspective, and Open Range a classical rancher shootout showdown. (His The Postman may be post-apocalyptic, but it, too, is all about horses trotting between outposts nonetheless.) With Horizon’s first chapter, he stretches across the plains and the canyons, echoing Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, Eastwood’s Unforgiven and his own Wolves and Ranges, letting each storyline start brewing with comfortably gripping potential and familiar images. He draws his narratives in languorous shorthand, letting the cliche gather the force of emotional expression from a sincere storyteller. The film’s three hours are engaging and expansive, while feeling lengthy yet somehow quick. I found myself leaving satisfied without any resolution, craving Chapter 2.