Deadpool & Wolverine review - 'never misses an opportunity to poke foul-mouthed fun at everything Marvel'

I Saw the TV Glow (15) ****

It’s been 24 years since Hugh Jackman first played Wolverine in X-Men. Though a generation has since grown up convinced that Marvel movies started with 2008’s Iron Man, the relative success of that first X-Men film – which was arguably down to Jackman’s star-making performance – helped kickstart the comic-book movie boom that finally sputtered to a halt with the failure of last year’s The Marvels. The irony, then, isn’t lost on Deadpool & Wolverine co-writer/director Shawn Levy that – thanks to Disney now owning the rights to both characters after buying 20th Century Fox – Wolverine is being folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a low point in the convoluted franchise’s short history. Indeed, this fact is called out explicitly by this tail-eating crossover movie, which never misses an opportunity to poke foul-mouthed fun at everything Marvel.

Reuniting the fourth-wall-smashing Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) with Jackman’s Logan for the first time since 2009’s dreary X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the film uses its title characters’ status as literal and figurative outsiders in the MCU to comment on its current woes by using the MCU’s post-Avengers reliance on the multiverse to pay sly tribute to the patchy, pre-Iron Man history of Marvel characters on the big screen. Before it gets to that, though, it also uses the multiverse to bring back the titular Wolverine, who you may recall died a noble death at the end of 2017’s Logan, a film that holds up as one of the more robust comic book movies of recent years and which offered a fine send-off for the character. In the multiverse, though, no one really dies and when Deadpool learns that his own timeline is due to be terminated because Wolverine sacrificed himself, he blows a chance to join the so-called “sacred timeline” of the Avengers movies in order to scour the other timelines for another Wolverine who can help him prevent the demise of his world and everyone in it.

It’s a nifty idea and Levy uses Deadpool and Wolverine’s status as interlopers from another studio’s films as license to continue deconstructing superhero lore, at one point turning it into a kind of comic-book movie equivalent of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author by having them enter a wasteland repository for non-MCU characters who – deservedly or not – never got there due. Quite how a lot of the insider-y jokes that result will land with general audiences is anyone’s guess, especially since it’s conceivable that large chunks of the potential audience for this film weren’t even born when some of the movies referenced were first released (the best joke depends on you remembering, for instance, that the MCU wasn’t every Marvel actor’s first superhero rodeo).

This can be exhausting to watch as well, of course. Like the first two Deadpool films, there’s something a little cynical about its own heavily ironised cynicism – and Reynolds’ relentlessly ribald schtick doesn’t always hit its mark. But Jackman makes it work. Refusing to coast by, he rises to the challenge of bringing something new to his portrayal of Wolverine, who’s angrier, funnier and not especially heroic this time out. As one legacy character puts it, though, he always shows up when he’s needed, which in this otherwise ultra meta film counts as a subtle acknowledgment that Jackman might just be the hero that Marvel needs.

Not quite a horror film, not quite a coming-of-age movie, trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow takes pop culture obsession and 90s nostalgia and transforms them into a creepy, strange, richly imaginative meditation on feeling not quite right in your own skin. Kicking off in 1996, it revolves around Owen, a quiet mixed race suburban kid who who bonds with older teen girl Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) over a young adult fantasy TV show called The Pink Opaque (Owen is played as a kid by Ian Foreman and as a teen and beyond by Justice Smith). The show itself – named for a compilation album by Scottish dream-pop pioneers the Cocteau Twins – is a sort of cheap knock-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But its implausibly late airtime adds to the illicit appeal for Owen, who isn’t allowed to stay up to watch it and so has to sneak over to Maddy’s house or wait for the videotapes she invariably makes for him as his obsession grows.

The film is narrated by Owen at a later stage in his life, and we soon learn the show was prematurely cancelled around the time Maddy mysteriously left town – two events that have left Owen in a numbed state of arrested development. Schoenbrun uses all of this to allegorise emerging feelings of sexual identity and gender dysphoria, but never in a way that’s simplistic or overly literal. Preferring Lynchian abstraction to dramatically dull didacticism, the film takes some wild turns as Owen’s reality fractures and he’s forced to confront aspects of both the show and his life that he might have misremembered or misinterpreted. Throughout, Schoenbrun fills the film with startling imagery, canny casting choices (see Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s brief turn as Owen’s indifferent – and terrifying – father,) and carefully curated period details that all add to the film’s lucid dream-like quality. True, some will find the stilted dialogue exasperating and Schoenbrun overplays their hand with a late rug-pull that undermines the credibility of the TV show’s strange appeal. Yet there’s no denying this is an uncompromising and original work.

Deadpool & Wolverine is in cinemas from 25 July; I Saw the TV Glow is on selected release from 26th July