Let’s be honest here: the superhero genre is dying a slow, painful death. While these movies and their beloved characters will never truly see a clear end, thanks to the overpopulated space that streaming and the multiverse have provided for them, what was once a genre that everyone went to the theatres to enjoy has turned into a mess. While superhero fatigue is often cited as the reason for the distance we feel from these movies as audiences; I’d double down on the fact that there’s just not enough heart put into these movies. Ever since Endgame, the MCU has felt like an extension of nostalgia bait (“Spiderman: No Way Home“) and bad CGI (pretty much everything in the last ten years). These movies now look like garbage and feel like they have lost their regenerating power. That is until “Deadpool & Wolverine,” a genuinely fun adventure that doesn’t take itself or anything else that ‘nerds’ have associated with the superhero genre seriously. 

For one, Ryan Reynolds, who still feels like he was born to play Wade Wilson, a.k.a Deadpool, a.k.a The Merc with the Mouth, has been teasing this team up for years. the small cut-out we saw on his face during the first Deadpool movie in 2016? The journey from there to having Hugh Jackman come out of his retired character to play along to the doozy, self-referential shenanigans feels like a true feat on its own. We all knew that Deadpool was a minor player in the MCU, so what director Shaw Levy does with “Deadpool & Wolverine” is truly funny. 

The movie kicks off with the first major conflict in Wade’s life—i.e., him feeling insignificant in the comic book universe. Since his movies are R-rated, there’s no way the antihero can reach the same level as, let’s say, Tony Stark, Captain America, or even Thor. A major gripe for this has to be the Fox and Marvel conflict over owning the rights to X-Men. The insignificance was so large that, in spite of the 2016 hit, being a part of ‘The Avengers’ was never in sight for Wade. In the film, he is retired and has broken up with the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). His mid-life crisis of no-mattering has set in, and he has some major doubts about himself. 

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