CinePals Calls Deadpool & Wolverine 'Remarkably Good' and Possibly the Best in the Franchise

Straight out of the theater, I didn't want to bury the lead: "it's a remarkably good film, somehow they've managed to pull it off." I watched it sitting in a car with an unplanned Wolverine t-shirt and a Deadpool colored car interior, describing the experience as one shared with an audience that included an older woman nearby reacting through the whole movie with exclamations like "oh dear," "oh my stars," and "oh Lord," before ending up clapping by the credits. There was also a complaint that the theater ran an unusually long block of trailers, with the posted 3:20 showtime not actually starting the film until 3:51.

The strongest praise centered on the emotional weight of the movie mixed with its comedy, noting Deadpool films always manage to sneak in real heart alongside the jokes, the fourth wall breaks, and a strong story. The film's self-aware "Marvel Jesus" joke was highlighted as an example of it "clowning everything" about the Marvel Cinematic Universe while still being respectful to it, similar to how a Marvel sequel needs cameos, surprises, and to be familiar but fresh without leaning on hollow fan service the way Star Wars did by bringing back Palpatine.

Action was singled out as a major highlight, with one unspecified sequence involving two characters described as knocking socks off and only comparable to the hallway fight in Oldboy and the bus sequence in Shang-Chi. That praise came with a caveat: "I'm more hypercritical when it comes to action and fight scenes," so some of the action was called merely fine for getting the plot from point A to point B, while other moments were called "a beautiful symphony of chaos."

A major surprise was how equally the story treated Wolverine rather than giving Hugh Jackman a glorified cameo, calling it "as much a Wolverine story as it is a Deadpool story" and comparing this film's version of the character to the one seen in Logan. The pairing of Deadpool's clowning energy with Wolverine's intensity was compared to the chemistry of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, with a guess that the real life friendship between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, also visible in a Hot Ones interview watched earlier that day, helps explain why the two characters play off each other so well onscreen.

The villain was called strong and horrific at times, with some of what the character does described as genuinely uncomfortable in a way that still impressed. The closing thought was that this might be a favorite Deadpool movie, partly because the third installment somehow still manages to deliver a redemption story for the character, with a recommendation to see it in a packed theater or, at the very least, not alone.