The Marvel machine has brilliantly rendered the movie critic useless. By enforcing a strict regime in which every installment in its endless cinematic universe must be seen for the whole set to be appreciated, it erases a sense of individual craftmanship such that reviews are meaningless. At this point, audiences are bought in or they aren't. Impressively, this strategy has forced the hands of critics themselves, who hand bad movies Fresh rating after Fresh rating, because why the heck not. 

The latest MCU installment, Deadpool & Wolverine, is painfully and profoundly soulless. Its plot is completely nonsensical and immaterial; jokes are wincingly self-referential and universally unfunny; actors are reduced to wink-and-nod automatons; and the artistry of the entire project could not be more squarely at rock bottom. Yet, as their potency against the Marvel machine has been completely diluted, critics collectively have trotted out another Fresh rating at a commendable 79%. Trapped in a hellish liminal space (reminiscent of a certain cinematic Void), they have no choice. 

Perhaps the most painful aspect of this iteration of the universe — now just the latest of 34 movies and squarely within the clinically titled "Phase Five" — is the storytelling device of its main character. Although callbacks and tie-ins are an intrinsic part of the Marvel project, Deadpool is a particularly powerful tool in the belt of the corporate machine because, as director Shawn Levy described in an interview, "Wade himself is a fan [and ] because he's in some ways a fawning motormouthed little fanboy himself, it allows the movie to call out and reference a ton of deep-cut Marvel references." 

That conceit — fun and flirty back in the hero's 2016 debut, but now extremely grating and artistically bankrupt — is the centerpiece of blockbuster director Levy's outing here. Although him and his cronies on the movie (including Marvel Studios president and ever-present top-line producer Kevin Feige) love to yap about the emotional heart that Hugh Jackman's storied Wolverine brings to the film, it's a Ryan Reynolds / Deadpool vehicle through and through, to the absolute detriment of the audience and the art of moviemaking. (The poster, which sells Deadpool bigger and Wolverine just peeking through his claws, as well as the official title leaked earlier this year, Deadpool & Friend, both underscore the diminishment of the more thoughtful, interesting, and sincere character of the two.) 

Because the plot is essentially arbitrary, driven by its insatiably commercial need for fan service, it doesn't make much sense to walk through in detail here. At a high level, it involves Deadpool not making the cut to join the Avengers superteam so retiring to a life of mundanity as a used car salesman. He's pulled back into superheroism by a complex multiverse plot conceit that involves recurring time travel watchdog the Time Variance Authority and a need to save Logan due to his hand-wavingly explained "anchor being" importance to the universe. (Although Logan died in his eponymous 2017 film, no matter, because the point of the multiverse is to allow infinite permutations of superhero exploits with no stakes. Why we should care about any one storyline, when by the movie's own admission there are more than 10,000 Earths all with their own versions of Deadpool and Wolverine, is unclear at best.) Deadpool ends up finding a characteristically surly Logan, and the two embark on all sorts of convoluted fan-service capers peppered with dozens of silly, arbitrary cameos, forgettable villains, and paper-thin character development. 

At every turn, the MCU tie-ins and multiverse explanations minimize any potential drama and excitement of Deadpool & Wolverine. Early on, when Wade Wilson is rejected from the Avengers as he makes puppy-dog eyes at Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan, we can't empathize with Wade because we hardly know what the Avengers stand for anymore; the last movie was five years ago, and production hasn't even started on 2026's Doomsday, so invoking them feels hollow. The throwaway faux-emotion from the scene is the first of many callbacks to other glory days of the universe. For Wade, we're constantly reminded of the first Deadpool, when his shtick was novel and entertaining, in washed-out flashbacks. For Logan, we're instructed to care about some made-up alternative timeline in which he was the universe's "worst Wolverine," but which is never fleshed out beyond some half-hearted distant screams and clunky exposition. Scripted fourth-wall jokes about how we're "joining the MCU at a low point" don't make up for the fact that we're joining the MCU at a low point. Making empty, repetitive garbage isn't improved by commenting how empty and repetitive the garbage is. 

The humor, too, becomes tired fast. The first couple jokes about Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox are good, but quickly overdone. It's no wonder that the film's producers and scriptwriters find the business of Hollywood good comedic fodder, but it comes across as navel-gazing to a lay audience. It's hard to even crack a smile when, after being berated for half the movie with the same jokes about entertainment-industry M&A, Deadpool shouts, "Fuck you, Fox, I'm going to Disneyland!" The same is true for the lion's share of the film's bits, which are predominantly service to only the most committed fanboys who are so entrenched in the universe they know the corporate backstory of each of its characters and films. Some jokes verge on sad, too, such as jabs at Hugh Jackman's return after his character's death ("They're gonna make him do this 'til he's 90!") or disses of his true passion, musical theater, like with half-hearted digs at his Broadway show The Music Man. 

Many Marvel movies are kept afloat by compelling villains, from the meditatively egalitarian Thanos to the father-next-door Vulture. No such luck in that department here, as Deadpool & Wolverine trots out one of the least creative baddies in recent memory. Cassandra Nova arrives on screen with a lot of clout, with her sinisterly bald head evoking twin brother Charles Xavier. But she never feels at home in the script, in large part thanks to an uneven performance by newcomer Emma Corrin. (Corrin cites Christoph Waltz and Gene Wilder as inspirations for the performance, but is not in the same ballpark — nay, the same sport — as either.) And although Cassandra's ability to claw through people's faces is one of the only creative effects of the film, she serves as a weaker foil than Matthew Macfadyen's catty TVA employee, and her climactic "battle" involves mostly standing in front of a screen, making it perhaps the most boring in MCU history. 

But sure, people don't come to Marvel for thoughtful stories, clever jokes, and multifaceted characters; they're here for the action! Besides shock-value violence, though, Deadpool & Wolverine has some of the least imaginative comic-book fights and effects of all time. Opening credits take place in a noncommittal forest against noncommittal TVA baddies. A fight between the two titular characters that could've been epic happens, tongue-in-cheek, in a beat-up Honda Odyssey, turning into a bloody but uncreative brawl whose most memorable aspect is that, ha ha, it's in a Honda Odyssey. When the two make nice and link up with other heroes from past movies, like Wesley Snipes' Blade and Jennifer Garner's Elektra, the bigger action sequences are so poorly-shot and desperate to fit in cameos that they lose the entertaining campy detail of any particular mutants' powers, like Toad's tongue or Blob's size. Similarly, besides a so-bad-it's-good Cajun accent, Channing Tatum's Gambit is even less cool and his abilities even less clear than they were 15 years ago played by Taylor Kitsch in the terrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine. A climactic showdown between Deadpool, Wolverine, and an army of multiverse other -pool characters is pathetically evocative of the Spider-verse series without any of its wit and stylistic panache. And once Wolverine puts on his comic-book cowl, Hugh Jackman is conspicuously replaced by a distractingly artificial full CGI body-double that bobs up and down like an NPC, laughably shoddy work. Throughout all the fights, too, needle-drops try much too hard to amp up the low entertainment value, with all-timers from NSYNC and Madonna making desperate efforts to distract from the unimaginative action on screen.

Expecting to have escaped the worst of the film's many missteps by the end, the credits were the straw that broke the camel's back. Behind-the-scenes footage rolls from past films as Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" plays. Although it's supposed to leave audiences with a good taste in their mouth, it did the exact opposite, feeling more like a funeral ode to better days and movies with real heart and soul, such as the original X-Men series: an obvious disconnect between the cynical crassness of Deadpool & Wolverine and artificially shmaltzy nostalgia. Even for audiences who may have had the "time of their life" watching sincere, fun, tentpole films like Iron Man and The Avengers over the course of the MCU, Deadpool & Wolverine reflects the absolute worst of the commercialized and self-referential universe.