I remember thinking the first two Deadpool movies were hilarious, plus there’s been a lot of positive reviews for the third film, so I was looking forward to Deadpool & Wolverine. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I didn’t laugh once. The main joke of the movie seems to be that’s it’s funny to play a pop song during a fight scene as they do this repeatedly. I think the first time I saw a show play upbeat music during a violent scene, it was an episode of the X-Files back in the 90s. I was impressed at the time since it was so unexpected, but decades later, upbeat music playing during a bloody scene no longer feels novel.

I recall Deadpool making political jokes in the first two movies, but he avoids saying anything political this time around. They probably wanted to make a movie conservatives would like. In fact, Deadpool worries about getting canceled a couple times, which makes him a conservative stand in. It might make some conservatives nervous that Deadpool flirts with other men, but he does it as a joke, not in a serious way. In one scene, Deadpool and Wolverine stay up all night long fighting in a rocking van, penetrating each other with long blades, which I guess is their version of sex, but it’s played for laughs.

It makes me wonder if the first two movies aren’t actually as funny as I thought they were. Maybe part of the humor comes from a superhero movie, which the audience expects to be PG-13, unexpectedly containing R-rated material. It’s funny the first couple times, but the joke wears thin by the third go round. I also wonder if the third film isn’t as funny as the first two because Weasel (played by T. J. Miller) isn’t in it. I haven’t seen the first two for a while, but I remember him having some of the funniest lines. It’s understandable they wouldn’t want to have him in the third film given the controversy surrounding him, but it’s weird that they don’t mention Weasel at all, when you’d expect the fourth-wall-breaking Deadpool would address his absence openly.

Something that disgusted me about Deadpool & Wolverine is the movie thought killing good guys in the most violent and gruesome manner possible was funny. Johnny Storm and Nicepool are the only two truly good people in the movie and they get the most over-the-top gruesome death scenes while Deadpool jokes about it. Why do the good guys get more gruesome deaths than the bad guys and why are we supposed to laugh about it? The opening scene features Deadpool slaughtering several TVA agents without establishing that they’re bad and we’re supposed to laugh. I guess in the world of Deadpool, murder and male homosexuality are supposed to be funny in and of themselves.

The surprise cameos were fun, but their screen time was so short, we didn’t get to spend much time with them. The cameos (except for Wolverine, of course) amounted to simply reminding us of their existence. They could have easily cut one or more of the boring fight scenes and done more with the characters. Spider-Man: No Way Home did a much better job of showcasing the pre-MCU Marvel characters who had cameos in that. I was disappointed that Blade and the others didn’t get to do much besides be there. When the first Deadpool movie came out, everyone called it the first R-rated Marvel movie, completely ignoring the three Blade films that came before. And Ryan Reynolds was even in one of the Blade movies playing a character who acts just like Deadpool!

Deadpool & Wolverine had too much CGI fight scenes which just weren’t interesting to watch. YouTube reminded of Jackie Chan recently. Chan’s fight scenes were clever and interesting to watch and he didn’t use any CGI. Daredevil (the Netflix series) also had good solid fight scenes. However, the fight scenes in most superhero movies are a mess of CGI, quick cuts, and shaky cameras which make it difficult to tell what’s happening (a plus when your actors aren’t good at fight choreography). Plus, when you have two immortal characters like Deadpool and Wolverine fighting each other, what’s the point? Neither can harm the other. The fact the two main characters are immortal makes for extremely low stakes in all their fight scenes.

I was told by a friend to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine and The Wolverine before watching this. I’d never seen them before and neither were very good. In X-Men Origins, there’s a scene in which a character tells Wolverine that Gambit is cool. Here’s a tip to all movie makers: if you have to tell us something in your movie is cool… it isn’t. (Likewise, there’s a scene in Deadpool & Wolverine where Ryan Reynolds turns to the camera before one of the fight scenes and tells us what we’re about to see is going to be super awesome. It wasn’t.)

X-Men Origins begins with a scene where a team of superpowered white guys (with one token black guy) slaughter a bunch of black people in Africa. It’s not a great look. Especially since the reason they did it was to get a piece of meteorite which they could have easily stolen without killing anybody by using teleportation. The movie just wanted an excuse to show off everyone’s superpowers. Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool in X-Men Origins as well, and the extended fight scene between him and Wolverine at the end of that movie turned out to be pointless since, again, both of them are immortal. I did like The Wolverine better than X-Men Origins, but it also suffers from far too many uninteresting fight scenes.

Deadpool & Wolverine is apparently the highest grossing R-rated film of all time, so obviously my opinion is in the minority. I can see why so many people liked it. I liked the first two after all. Cassandra Nova was a great creepy villain. The movie overall just didn’t work for me. Maybe my taste in movies has changed over the years or maybe I was expecting too much. Muddled CGI fight scenes (with or without blood) just don’t interest me anymore. Neither do endless Easter egg hunts for ever more obscure references. The sexually-explicit humor wasn’t pleasantly shocking to me like it was when I was younger. Maybe I’ve just gotten too old.

My biggest problem is the way Deadpool treats Nicepool. Nicepool does everything he can to help Deadpool out, and in return, Deadpool gleefully gets him killed while cracking jokes about it. He does the same thing to Johnny Storm. All of Deadpool’s other friends should take note of this behavior because it’s only a matter of time before they get the same treatment.