'Deadpool & Wolverine' review: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman join forces in unimaginative, meandering threequel

"Watch a movie or be part of one," goes the tagline for IMAX, which is one way to see Marvel’s hopeful summer smash "Deadpool & Wolverine." That’s ironic, because this is a movie that never, ever lets you forget you’re watching one.

Number of jokes about expositional monologues: two. References to Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox, the studio that introduced this franchise: at least three (including a shot of the old studio’s former logo crumbling in a desert). Moments when Ryan Reynolds, as the flippant superhero Deadpool, breaks the fourth wall (and tells us he’s doing so): innumerable.

Nearly 10 years ago, the first "Deadpool" (2016) shattered the Marvel mold with this vein of smarty-pants humor and threw in great globs of R-rated violence for good measure. Reynolds is nothing if not a pop culture genius, and his formula worked: "Deadpool" and its 2018 sequel raked in $780 million each. By adding Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, one of the most beloved figures in the Marvel canon, Movie No. 3 might well surpass them.

Written by Reynolds (with franchise veterans Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick), the movie reintroduces the disfigured, unkillable Deadpool as a dispirited washout reduced to selling cars to suburbanites. He can’t get hired by The Avengers (Jon Favreau, as Happy Hogan, marks the first of many cameos) and he’s lost his true love, Vanessa (a barely-there Morena Baccarin). It’s all somewhat improbable and poorly explained; more expositional speeches might have helped.

In an out-of-nowhere twist, Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), a bureaucrat with the Time Variance Authority, informs Deadpool that his world is doomed unless he can revive the long-dead Wolverine — an "anchor being" whose very existence can alter fate. After a great deal of meandering, and more cameos, we finally meet our villain: Cassandra Nova, a sadistic psychic (from the "X-Men" universe) played with impressive intensity by Emma Corrin.

Corrin’s Cassandra is compelling enough to deserve her own movie; she probes people’s minds literally, fingers emerging from eyeballs and nostrils. But moviegoers ("nerds," Deadpool calls us) must be served, which means the two heroes engage in much buddy-comedy banter and stage two knockdown, drag-out fights — which is one too many. Director Shawn Levy ("Night at the Museum") does his part, setting brutal bloodshed to "ironic" pop songs like NSYNC’s "Bye Bye Bye."

And how's Jackman? Wisely playing it straight as the boozing, self-pitying Wolverine — a redemption figure in the making — he gives this movie something like a heart. But he’s stuck in a sequel that steals its best ideas (much of the action takes place in a "Mad Max"-inspired landscape), rehashes old material and stoops to topical humor (namely, a joke about Will Smith’s Oscar slap). Reynolds probably knows exactly what he’s doing here. But I’d rather just watch a movie than be pandered to by one.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman