Getting Stabbed Doesn’t Hurt

(…or, Everything That’s Wrong with Deadpool & Wolverine)

Well, I finally got around to watching Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Deadpool & Wolverine. This was the first Marvel movie I’d watched in a while, and now I remember why. Holy smoke, what a crappy film! As I watched it—doggedly, hoping it would get better, resisting the urge to switch it off—I began to realize that this film is not only bad, it is profoundly bad. That is, bad in a way that’s worth talking about.

Normally, being a nominal “artist” myself, I don’t lay into other people’s work just because I don’t like it. Why bother? But this movie triggered me in such a way that I have to rant about it for a while. Specifically, it pissed me off because it breaks the single most important rule of genre fiction (which applies equally to genre film): Keep it Real.

Wait a moment, you say. Realistic genre fiction? Realistic fantasy fiction? Sounds like an oxymoron, right? Actually, no. For while every Marvel movie, like every James Bond movie and every action movie and every horror movie and even every science fiction movie, is, in a sense a fantasy, the good ones display a kind of realism that’s critical, and vastly more important than any sense of day-to-day realism in the story itself. This is psychological realism. And psychological realism has its root in physiological realism—the realism of the human body.

I was struck by how many characters in Deadpool & Wolverine get stabbed, including Deadpool himself. Notably, many of them are stabbed in the groin (or in the ass, LOL!), which should be a particularly grotesque and shocking act of violence but is presented in the film with all the drama of a pie-fight. What really stood out, though, was that nobody who gets stabbed (“good” guy or “bad” guy) seems to mind that much. It doesn’t seem to hurt. Sure, the poor victim will scream—in that shrill, girly way intended for comic effect—but they never really seem to feel actual pain. Indeed, Deadpool himself literally laughs it off when he gets stabbed.

Yeah, I know. I’m being a curmudgeon. Clearly, Deadpool & Wolverine is not intended to be a “real” movie. Rather, it’s a spoof. A parody of all the innumerable Marvel movies that have come before it, many of them cranked out by that great entertainment sausage factory that is the Disney Corporation. Unfortunately, going in, I didn’t know it was a spoof. I thought, maybe, it would have some actual story, and some actual characters with actual fears and pain and desires.

What a rube I was! Instead, the movie feels like one long, bad, inside joke.

To be fair, it isn’t all bad. Kevin Feige is a gifted director, with a brilliant sense of pacing and a talent for balletic action sequences—although, in this film, they have all the emotional impact of one of those Mint Mobile commercials that Ryan Reynolds has become even more famous for. Speaking of Ryan Reynolds, he is an actor of enormous charm and great comic timing. With his constant wise-cracking and effortlessly light touch, he seems like Gen Z’s version of Danny Kaye (if Danny Kaye had ever been a superhero who repeatedly stabbed people in the crotch). And the second half of the movie, when it at least pretends to have a real story, is almost watchable. (I particularly liked the cameo by Wesly Snipes as Blade, who got my only real laugh with one of his throwaway lines).

But, overall, the movie sucks. It sucks, despite the fact that it has many elements of a great B-movie action flick: a bad-ass anti-hero, a good villain, stunts, romance, and (of course) humor. But the film cuts its own throat (or, better yet, stabs itself in the groin) by constantly breaking the fourth-wall and winking at the viewer, reminding them that, nah, this isn’t real. Don’t take it too seriously.

Gee, thanks!

Contrast this attitude with a genuinely great action movie like John Wick. It’s a superhero fantasy, too, right? I mean, nobody can walk into a nightclub full of Russian gangsters, wipe them all out, and live to tell the tale. But we don’t care. The director, and Keanu Reeves especially, makes it real. When John Wick gets hit or shot or strangled or (yes) stabbed, you can see the pain and rage on his face. The talent of the filmmakers is to allow us, as viewers, to suspend our disbelief (in Coleridge’s famous phrase) and invest in the drama.

In other words, we feel the wounds, too.

That is the point of fiction. Of drama.

Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t even try.