Deadpool & Wolverine toned Deadpool down for Disney, and it shows

Deadpool was created in 1990, so he’s technically a millennial — but his wry, self-aware, pointedly irreverent humor is pure Gen X. While Deadpool & Wolverine is the first film in the Deadpool franchise to be produced under the traditionally family-friendly auspices of the Walt Disney Company, the director and writers (all Gen Xers themselves) clearly wanted to retain at least the appearance of the previous movies’ transgressive edge.

Deadpool & Wolverine contains a few jokes that likely would have made Walt Disney blush. “Pegging isn’t new for me, friendo,” Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) quips in the film’s first trailer. “But it is for Disney.” The sly glance at the camera that follows that joke felt like a statement of intent, implying that the character would remain uncompromised in his transition to Disney’s stewardship. Still, as the film goes on, it’s obvious that there are very clear limits to what director Shawn Levy and the screenwriters (Reynolds among them) were and were not allowed to do.

[Ed. note: Spoilers for a lot of specific gags from the whole Deadpool trilogy follow.]

Image: Jay Maidment/Marvel Studios

The film makes a strong opening argument for its transgressiveness, with an opening-credits sequence where Deadpool beats a bunch of Time Variance Authority henchmen to death with the adamantium remains of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) from Logan, literally desecrating the mutant hero’s grave while metaphorically tarnishing that movie’s bittersweet ending. “I’m not proud of any of this,” Deadpool tells the audience. But that seems disingenuous. Reynolds, Levy, and the rest of the writers take pride in the movie’s provocations.

A large part of Deadpool’s appeal — as a movie franchise, a character, and a brand — is the sense that nothing is sacred. In an era where comic book movies sometimes take themselves far too seriously, the character’s brand of irreverence is a breath of fresh air. In 2016, the first Deadpool felt a little like an act of guerilla filmmaking within the world of mega-franchises, with Reynolds leaking a test reel to the internet to force Fox to greenlight the movie, and foregoing his salary to pay for the writers to be present on set.

Deadpool & Wolverine has its share of “Wait… is it okay to joke about that?” gags. Many of these invoke the actors’ personal lives. There’s a sly reference to the marriage and divorce of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, who worked together on the 2003 Daredevil movie. There’s an allusion to Wesley Snipes’ disagreements with Reynolds on the set of Blade: Trinity. Deadpool even breaks the fourth wall to suggest that Jackman hasn’t gotten back in shape following his recent divorce.

Within the fictional world of the movie itself, Chris Evans subverts his good-guy image as the MCU’s Captain America to play a foul-mouthed version of his Human Torch character from Tim Story’s 2005 Fantastic Four and its sequel. This version of Johnny Storm has his skin ripped off by the villain Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), and later, in flashback, describes her with a profane stream of insults. That isn’t how Marvel audiences are used to seeing Evans.

Image: 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios

There are even a couple of softball jokes at the expense of the larger Marvel Studios apparatus. Taking Wolverine to the TVA, Deadpool welcomes his companion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, admitting, “You’re joining at a bit of a low point.” Later, as Deadpool faces down an army of multiversal doppelgängers led by Lady Deadpool (Blake Lively), he interrupts the movie to complain about the larger direction of the franchise in the wake of Avengers: Endgame. These jokes are fairly broad compared to the specificity of the jokes about Reynolds’ co-stars, but they’re meant to seem even more daring: an actor biting the hand of the studio that keeps giving him a platform.

The jokes Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t tell are just as interesting, though. Disney has a very different set of priorities than Fox, which produced the first two films in the series. Disney has built its image around a family-friendly brand: The company didn’t release a PG-13 movie until 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean. There were internal debates about placing mature content on the Disney Plus streaming service. There was always bound to be some tension between Disney’s mission and Deadpool’s.

Reynolds has conceded that the R rating was “a huge step” for the company. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige rushed to assure audiences that Deadpool & Wolverine is “the sweetest, most wholesome R-rated movie.” Reynolds has talked about letting his own 9-year-old child watch the film. And it’s true that while the film features Wolverine swearing like a sailor, Deadpool & Wolverine’s claws have been blunted by comparison with the previous two movies.

The first two Deadpool movies featured joke opening-title sequences. Instead of crediting key creatives by name, the credits reveal that the films were directed, respectively, by “an overpaid tool” and “one of the guys who killed the dog in John Wick,” and that they star “God’s perfect idiot” alongside “a CGI character” and “a gratuitous cameo.” These films were shot by “Blind Al” and written by “the real heroes.”

Image: 20th Century Fox/Disney Plus

These are good gags, demonstrating that the creatives working on the film don’t take themselves too seriously and are willing to make themselves the butt of the joke. By contrast, while Deadpool & Wolverine’s credits play over that scene of “light necrophilia” with Wolverine’s corpse, the credits themselves are straightforward. This is still “a Kevin Feige production,” “directed by Shawn Levy.”

That change-up is an odd choice, particularly given that one consistent criticism of the MCU in recent years has been the way Feige exerts control over productions. As The Marvels director Nia DaCosta put it to Vanity Fair, any director has to understand that “some of you is going to take a back seat” because “it is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie.” If Feige had been willing to forgo a credit on the only Marvel Studios theatrical release this year in favor of a gag that was consistent throughout the first two movies, that might have gone some way toward combating this criticism.

The play-it-straight credits are particularly strange, given that Feige was willing to allow jokes at his expense in the Disney Plus series She-Hulk, which revealed that the MCU is overseen by an artificial intelligence known as K.E.V.I.N., which even (after some pushback from Feige himself) wears the producer’s iconic baseball cap. Deadpool & Wolverine is comparatively deferential to its new corporate owner. Apart from the broadest, softest lobs at Endgame and at Disney’s discomfort with off-color or adult material, the writers seem reluctant to joke about the actual MCU — the only timeline or setting that really matters for Marvel.

In Deadpool 2, the Merc with a Mouth is recruited into the X-Men by his old friend Colossus (Stefan Kapičić). Deadpool spends a great deal of time mocking the team. Shocked that none of the cast of the X-Men movies have shown up to cameo, he laments, “You’d think the studio would throw us a bone.” Noting the décor in Xavier’s mansion, he quips that he “should’ve brought [his] rape whistle.” Later, he introduces the team as “a dated metaphor for racism in the ’60s.”

Image: 20th Century Fox

Compare all that with Deadpool & Wolverine, where Deadpool travels to what the Disney Plus show Loki deems “the Sacred Timeline” — that is, the MCU’s corner of the multiverse — to ask if he can join the Avengers. The scene is shot with deference. There are loving close-ups on classic props. An Alan Silvestri score rings through the background. Deadpool lands zingers at the expense of Iron Man comic relief Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), but the heroes themselves are treated with respect and dignity. Deadpool is meek and starstruck. The Avengers are lauded, even in their absence.

It’s also clear that there are red lines for Deadpool & Wolverine that did not exist for Deadpool or Deadpool 2, particularly around sex and drugs. The new movie contains repeated references to cocaine — in the context of a joke about how Disney won’t let Deadpool reference cocaine. (In Deadpool 2, he just uses the drug.) Deadpool & Wolverine includes a joke about how pegging is new for Disney, but that’s a far cry from seeing it happen as part of a sex montage in the original Deadpool.

Deadpool & Wolverine features plenty of swagger and fourth-wall-breaking commentary about how it crosses lines and pushes boundaries, but its gags don’t commit the way Deadpool and Deadpool 2 do. The movie relies on inference, on telling rather than showing, on reminding the audience of edgier previous humor instead of engaging in it again. And it isn’t just jokes that are missing: While the film contains a lot of swear words and blood splatter, it’s as sexless as most of Marvel’s other movies. It features a handful of gay jokes, playing up the homoeroticism of the violence between Deadpool and Wolverine, but it doesn’t include a single kiss between Deadpool and his estranged wife Vanessa (Morena Baccarin).

While Deadpool 2 has its shortcomings, it at least explicitly acknowledges that Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and her girlfriend Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) are dating. Deadpool & Wolverine just has them sitting around together, at a decorous distance. When Wolverine expands on his tragic backstory that found the X-Men massacred by racists, there’s no effort to depict the brutality of that sort of atrocity. Compare that with Deadpool 2’s visceral presentation of the horrors of conversion therapy.

In certain ways, Deadpool & Wolverine is crass and vulgar, but it’s tellingly timid and toothless in others. This time out, the filmmakers are clearly dealing with more hard limits and no-go areas, and they’re forced to opt for surface-level provocation instead of genuine transgression. They aren’t allowed to make anyone truly uncomfortable — especially not the franchise’s new owner. Given Deadpool’s status as a Gen X hero, maybe it was inevitable that he’d eventually sell out.