DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

Here's the short version: there's a good movie fighting to get out of this one, and it loses. Deadpool's arc — a man who wants to become the hero his girlfriend believes he can be — has real moral shape. The jokes land, the cameos surprise, and the pace rarely lets up.

But the film doesn't just repeat the crudeness of the first two Deadpool movies — it deepens it. The obscenity count runs to roughly 140. The violence, especially between Deadpool and Wolverine, is prolonged and brutal in a way that stops feeling like action and starts feeling like spectacle for its own sake.

That's the trade this movie asks you to make: laugh with a hero who genuinely wants to change, while wading through degradation that keeps undercutting the very redemption it's selling. For most readers, that trade isn't worth making. Skip this one.

Wade Wilson wants his girlfriend Vanessa back — and to finally become the hero she believes he can be. When the Avengers turn him down, he hangs up the Deadpool suit and settles for an ordinary life with his friends. Then a power-hungry bureaucrat from the Time Variance Authority, calling himself Mr. Paradox, offers Wade one more shot at heroism. But Paradox's real plan threatens to erase Wade's entire universe — Vanessa and all. Wade needs help, and there's only one other person unkillable enough to give it: a very reluctant Wolverine.

Three stars means this is genuinely well-crafted entertainment, undone by its own excess. The jokes rarely stop, the cameos delight, and the film moves with real energy — except for the extended fight and slaughter sequences, which the source notes "seem to go on forever with no resolution." Deadpool and Wolverine's regenerative healing turns their brawls into something closer to attrition than drama, and a long sequence of Deadpool cutting down TVA soldiers stretches well past its welcome.

The craft is there — sharp comic timing, confident pacing through the exposition, a redemptive throughline that actually pays off by the end. But the film keeps choosing shock over restraint, and that choice costs it. What could have been a great superhero comedy settles for being a good one wrapped in excess.

The film's worldview is, in its own words, "strong pagan, slightly mixed, irreverent, often lawless" — but it isn't empty. Underneath the crude jokes and multiverse chaos sits a genuinely moral premise: Wade wants to matter, wants to protect his friends, wants to become worthy of the woman he loves. Sacrifice, not violence, is what ultimately resolves the story's central conflict, and the film says so plainly in its own dialogue.

There's also something more than pure relativism at work. The story's multiverse is a humanist playground where each timeline seems to invent its own rules — yet the film gestures toward values that hold across all of them. Wade's desire to be a certain kind of man isn't just personal preference; it's presented as a standard he's failing to meet, and one worth striving toward.

The trouble is proportion. A story built on sacrificial love and the hard work of becoming better gets nearly drowned out by 140 obscenities and violence that lingers well past the point of narrative necessity. The message survives, but only just.

Every human heart recognizes Wade's longing — to be loved, to matter, to lay down something of yourself for someone else. Scripture names that longing rightly: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

There's a good, even moving story buried in here about a man trying to become worthy of the people he loves. But 140-plus obscenities and violence that lingers well past its point bury it deeper than it can climb out. Our answer stands: skip it. For a family movie night that won't ask you to wade through that, check out our latest family-friendly picks.