I Just Don't Get the Merc with a Mouth

Deadpool isn't like the other superheroes -- he makes rape jokes!

After a thrilling weekend of binging the back half of the Avengers franchise, I’ll open with this: I understand why the Deadpool franchise is popular. It’s a marked departure from the typical Marvel formula: there’s fourth wall breaking, raunchy jokes, and it lacks the underlying self-seriousness behind (most) of Marvel’s theatrical releases. Whereas most Marvel movies fellate themselves over their A-List casts and (well, mostly) guaranteed box office success (one needs to look no further than the end credits of Avengers: Endgame for proof of this), Deadpool is a breath of fresh air, in that, unlike Marvel’s main franchises, it’s willing to embrace the fact that at its core, it’s a movie about a dude in a suit fighting crime.

While Deadpool vs. Wolverine is irreverent, pokes fun at the Disney overlords, and utilizes a truly flabbergasting amount of metatextual humor, especially for a mainstream, big-budget studio film release, it’s also emblematic of the main issues that have plagued most of Marvel’s recent releases—-while yes, Deadpool vs. Wolverine makes multiple jokes about Disney, it reads less like pointed jabs at a multi-billion dollar corporation, and more like a desperate studio exec saying “they’ll think we’re cool if we’re in on the joke, right?”¹ For, at the end of the day, Deadpool vs. Wolverine, as well as Deadpool 2 and the original Deadpool, were all big-budget, studio releases meant to elevate Marvel’s tent-pole franchises—-in the case of Deadpool 1 and 2, X-Men, and in the case of Deadpool vs. Wolverine², buoy the most recent multiverse plotline, which will most definitely be featured in Avengers: Secret Wars (to be released in 2027). And while yes, I enjoyed Deadpool vs. Wolverine, the entire time I was in the theaters, I couldn’t help but think it was little more than a hollow effort by Marvel, and by extension, Disney, to pretend that they’re in on the joke — that Marvel hasn’t been good since Avengers: Endgame (or maybe ever), and that we as an audience are all bored to death of superhero movies.

However, in attempting to be in on the proverbial joke, the Deadpool franchise utterly annihilates the established stakes of each movie. By breaking the fourth wall to the point of absurdity, it kills any hint of lingering dramatic tension; how are we, as the audience, supposed to care about the plot, when the characters don’t? Furthermore, none of the characters outside of the titular Deadpool/Wade Wilson are developed past the point of being one-dimensional tropes; while the opening credits of Deadpool and Deadpool 2 seem aware of this fact—-Deadpool 1 introduces Morena Baccarin as “A hot chick” and Ed Skrein as “A British villain”—-their titles prove to be very literal, as Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) proves to be little more than the personification of Amy Dunne’s “Cool Girl”³ monologue from Gone Girl, and in the case of Ajax (Ed Skrein), he could be replaced by Alan Rickman’s corpse and little would be changed about his character.

This leads me into my next issue—-there are few female characters in the Deadpool franchise, and the ones that are present feel like a one-note, male-constructed idea of how a woman should act. In the case of Vanessa, Deadpool’s love-interest, she’s a beer-slinging, Pop-Tart eating, ex-stripper who loves sex and pegging, and in the opening of Deadpool 2, shortly before being murdered (well, more like fridged⁴ for the development of the plot), she enthusiastically tells Deadpool that she wants to have a baby with him, which would feel more significant if we had any idea of who she is as a character outside of her relationship to the protagonist. She’s barely featured in Deadpool vs. Wolverine, and when she is onscreen, she’s there to compound Deadpool’s descent into complacency; a prize for him to win when he fulfills his character arc. In the entirety of the Deadpool franchise, there are exactly four female characters of note: Vanessa, who, again, feels like a male fantasy committed to the page, Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), who does little more than deliver snarky one-liners while pouting, Domino, who is defined solely by her usefulness for propelling the plot forward, and Blind Al (Leslie Uggams), who, despite being in all three Deadpool movies, we know nothing about other than the fact that she’s blind and has a fondness for cocaine.

Regarding Vanessa, she is abruptly murdered at the beginning of Deadpool 2, and rather than feeling like a meaningful or emotional moment, it is quickly undermined by the movie’s tendency to turn every moment into something comedic; while we are supposed to care because she’s Deadpool’s fiancée and the supposed motivation behind everything that he does, it’s hard to feel anything other than “this, again?” because her death serves as nothing more than a catalyst for his character arc in Deadpool 2 rather than carrying the emotional weight it necessitates and (spoilers) she’s brought back to life during the end-credits scene. How are we supposed to care about her death when it’s clear that the writers do not, and when she’s brought back at the whim of servicing the greater plot? This is not an uncommon problem in the Marvel universe; one needs to look no farther than the deaths of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson) in Avengers: Infinity War; both feel less like a prominent character dying an emotionally-impactful death, and more like an event meant to advance the plot.⁵

In that respect, and this applies to the greater Deadpool universe as well as Phase Five of the MCU, how does anything matter when there’s time travel and the multiverse; when formerly-dead characters can be brought back when the plot demands it? To its credit, Deadpool vs. Wolverine seems aware of this fact, and openly embraces it; the opening title credits scene features Deadpool brutally murdering members of the TVA⁶ with pieces of Wolverine’s recently-exhumed, decomposing corpse; while it does take, for lack of a better term, a steaming dump on the events of Logan, it’s also one of the few moments of Deadpool vs. Wolverine that I truly enjoyed, because not only were the team behind the movie aware that it was making a mockery of what is widely-regarded as the best Marvel movie, but reveling in it.

However, most importantly, Deadpool just isn’t funny. Maybe it’s because I find Ryan Reynolds to be as tone-deaf as a middle-school choir concert at best and a scab⁷ at worst, but for better or for worse, the humor in the Deadpool franchise has not aged well. Seriously — what’s with all of the rape jokes? Why does Deadpool make so many rape jokes? There’s a deeply transphobic joke in the original Deadpool, upon which Deadpool asks if a tertiary female character has a “wang” because she’s so strong, and then a date-rape joke about Negasonic Teenage Warhead. In Deadpool 2, there’s two rape jokes, and one is about a literal teenager getting prison-raped, and in Deadpool vs. Wolverine, Deapdool fires off a crack about getting molested by his camp counselor in the closing fifteen minutes.⁸ Am I missing something? Are rape jokes funny now? Or are they just okay because an actor with a good sense of comedic timing is the one delivering them? I’m willing to accept that I have a stick up my ass when it comes to comedy, but something feels off to me about a man flippantly firing off wisecracks about child molestation, date rape, and prison rape. Furthermore, the jokes that do land in the Deadpool franchise have a soulless, corporate quality to them; they feel like the result of countless test-screenings and think-tanks filled with harried studio execs. And simply put, as stated previously, much like many of Marvel’s offerings, Deadpool can’t decide whether it wants to be an all-out, balls-to-the-wall comedy, or a superhero movie with comedic elements. This issue is exemplified by the Avengers movies; characters will exchange quips in the midst of a penultimate battle, thus undermining the established dramatic tension. While with the Avengers, the dialogue has a particularly soulless, Joss Whedon-like quality to it, Deadpool hardly fares better; as stated, we barely sit with Vanessa’s death for longer than a few moments before it moves into the next joke, the next big comedic set piece. As I wrote previously—-how are we expected to take these movies seriously when they can hardly take themselves seriously?

I’m willing to accept that I just don’t know how to have fun. Maybe Deadpool is funny, maybe it did revitalize Marvel during an era of box-office bombs and titles like Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and maybe it’s just not for me. Or, maybe it’s just a desperate attempt by a studio losing millions of dollars with each new release to prove that it still does have its mojo and that we can go back to a time pre-Endgame, where each new Marvel release was a huge theatrical event. Both can be true.

1. Much like Mattel in Barbie (2023).

2. Especially in light of the Fox-Disney merger.

3. If you want to read an absolute masterpiece, check it out here: https://genius.com/Gillian-flynn-gone-girl-cool-girl-monologue-book-annotated

4. For the uninitiated: “fridged” is a literary trope for when a female character is harmed and/or killed for the sake of plot development. See: Gwen in The Amazing Spider Man 2, or, to use an in-universe example, Gamora and Natasha in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

5. This is further exemplified by Gamora’s demise, as it is when Starlord (Chris Pratt) learns of her untimely passing at the hands of Thanos that everything truly goes sideways for the titular Avengers, directly informing the events of Endgame.

6. For those unfamiliar with Phases Four and Five of the MCU, TVA stands for “Time Variance Authority.”

7. If you’re interested in reading about why Ryan Reynolds is a scab, I recommend looking into the drama surrounding the It Ends With Us movie.

8. It delivered quite the laugh at the Sunday matinee showing that I attended.