“Friends don’t let friends leave home looking like they fight crime for the Los Angeles Rams.

” The half-anguished, half-delighted, orgasmic yelp emitted by some in the audience when Wolverine finally donned his pointy-eared helmet suggests that the film knows how to hit that fan sweet spot.

Special sock, indeed.

The movie isn’t particularly good—I’m not even sure it qualifies as a movie—but it’s so determined to beat you down with its incessant irreverence that you might find yourself submitting to it.

The film arrives at a low point for Marvel, after a string of duds and a failed attempt to introduce a new superhero phase following the climactic, stage-clearing (and absurdly lucrative) battles of the past.

It’s somewhat of a relief that this new movie isn’t trying to reboot, revamp, extend, or set the stage for anything.

There’s a good joke about how it ties into a specific episode of a show, and it probably does, but I’m not going to bother finding out.

Honestly, it seems to exist solely to make money.

The film tries to wink its way out of its nonsense plot—a convoluted setup involving Deadpool finding a live Wolverine in another universe so he can save his own universe before it’s destroyed by a mysterious organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA), led by an extremely hammy Matthew Macfadyen.

It acknowledges its own cravenness, and that transparency can be preferable to stolid sincerity.

At least for a while.

“G’day, mate, there’s nothing that will bring me back faster than a big bag of Marvel cash,” Deadpool chirps in a Jackman-adjacent Aussie accent early on, when it looks like Wolverine will remain as dead as he was at the end of James Mangold’s film.

These characters appear to exist both as real superheroes and fictional creations played by real actors.

It’s best not to think too hard about it.

When Wolverine eventually comes back, Deadpool greets him casually with, “Welcome to the MCU, by the way.

You’re joining it at a bit of a low point.

” I can’t remember if he said this while standing against the ruins of an old 20th Century Fox logo in a blasted desert dimension called the Void, where useless things go to die; perhaps that was a later scene.

I’m pretty sure, though, that he said this sometime after he turned to the camera and yelled, “Suck it, Fox, I’m going to Disney World!” You get the idea.

There are approximately 296 other similar jokes where that one came from.

(“Make it stop!” “Mangold tried!”) At times, it feels like Deadpool has only two flavors of humor: knowing digs at the industry that spawned him and sex jokes.

(“I’m going to show you something.

Something huge.

” “That’s what Scoutmaster Kevin used to say.

”) Occasionally, it’s both: “Pegging isn’t new for me, but it is for Disney,” he says when he first sees a bunch of TVA soldiers and thinks they’re a gang of male prostitutes someone rented out for his birthday.