I haven’t watched an MCU film in ages but I couldn’t miss Deadpool’s official entrance into the Disney-owned Marvel. I was actually prepared to miss this if word-of-mouth was bad but reports indicated that this was exactly what I’d expected out of Ryan Reynolds. The film bored my wife and I both agree that it’s too long and can see why. It’s unashamedly a deep dive into over twenty years of superhero movie history so it’s not surprising that it offers little to non-Marvel fans. It’s a little too much even for me and it’s definitely not a good film in its own right without all that weight of history behind it, but it sure is a lot of fun who those who understand what it is doing.

As Deadpool fights off a squad of enforcers from the Time Variance Authority while digging up the corpse of Wolverine, he recounts the story of how he arrived at that point. This includes being rejected by the Avengers, settling into a regular salesman job after breaking up with his girlfriend Vanessa, and finally being invited by Mr. Paradox of the TVA to join the main MCU timeline because his own timeline is pruned. The cause is the death of the anchor being of his timeline which turns out to be Logan. Deadpool therefore searches through the multiverse for a replacement Logan, settling for one who has failed his version of the X-Men. The two of them are then dumped by Mr. Paradox into the Void, the trash heap of the Marvel Universe where all of the unwanted and forgotten characters are sent. As such they must fight through myriad characters from previous not so successful films in order to get out of the Void and save Deadpool’s original timeline.

As Deadpool himself observes, that’s a lot of exposition that involves confusing multiverse shenanigans. It also doesn’t make sense as the events of Logan ought to take place a long way in Logan’s future but who cares. It’s a thin justification anyway just to bring in a ton of characters including alternate versions of Deadpool from all over the place. Earning the R rating, there’s plenty of gory violence as the duo murderize their way through the multiverse, while Deadpool swears up a storm. Yet while the violence is graphic, it’s actually not very disturbing as it feels so cartoonish. With both Deadpool and Wolverine being capable of regeneration, much of the violence feels inconsequential as they do no lasting harm to one another no matter how much blood they spill. Nor does the film have much heart either. There are too many characters and too much going on. There’s a nod towards Vanessa as Deadpool’s source of motivation but it feels half-hearted and she’s barely in the film anyway. In terms of both satisfying action scenes and genuine emotion, I’d rank this below the two previous films.

Instead this Deadpool outing goes all out on the fourth wall breaking, constantly talking to the audience about every little real world detail. He crows about moving from 20th Century Fox to Disney, mocks Hugh Jackman for being forced to play Wolverine until he’s 90 years old, admits that the MCU is currently at a low point and complains about multiverse plots being overused. It dives deep into campy nostalgia by bringing back actors and characters across over twenty years of cinematic history, focusing on the duds instead of the successes. The writing includes some rather esoteric familiarity with the interplay between the comics and their movie adaptations as well. For example Gambit was an incredibly popular character in the 1990s and so the character’s introduction into film media was highly anticipated. Yet for a variety of reasons, this never truly came to fruition and so the character was stillborn as shown here. Then there’s the nonstop references featuring Dogpool, Gwenpool, and more, the yellow Wolverine costume and the iconic Wolverine poses and so on. There’s so much more than I don’t recognize, like the Honda Odyssey advertisement, but I’m sure it must mean something to someone.

In all fairness, this is a pretty terrible movie. It’s unashamedly a non-stop sequence of in-jokes, Easter Eggs, fan service made out of love for both comic books and their movie adaptations. Yet it is targeted to people like me and there must be a lot of people like me out there because this turned out to be a blockbuster hit and so many of the recent MCU films have failed. I wouldn’t want all the Marvel films to be like this and I fail to see how Ryan Reynolds could take this concept as further but for now, this sure is a guilty pleasure.