Deadpool & Wolverine review round-up: Is the MCU saved?

Reviews for the MCU movie everyone has been waiting for are here. But is Deadpool & Wolverine any good?

For the most part, it sure is.

Deadpool & Wolverine contains just what you’d expect. There’s lots of irreverent Deadpool-y humour, the buddy comedy element is strong, and there’s the requisite big action scenes that feature in every Marvel movie.

But let’s take a closer look at what the critics really thought. We’re going to move roughly from the most positive to the least positive. The film, at the time of writing, has an 80% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a rather less shiny-sounding 54% on Metacritic. It's not all triumph and roses here, folks.

Empire gave Deadpool & Wolverine a 4/5 rating: “Despite a few early narrative bumps, it’s hard to imagine what more you could want from a movie with this pairing. Marvel has found its mojo again.”

The Times also gave the film a 4/5 rating, saying “this hyperactive cheese dream is huge fun.”

The Evening Standard is mostly happy Jackman's Wolverine is back in cinemas in its 4/5 review: “This is Wolverine’s first time in the MCU proper… and oh boy, we’ve been waiting a long time for it…There is a plot, but mostly, it’s just an excuse to heap fan service upon fan service.”

rogerebert.com doled out a 2.5/4 review score: “despite the silly mayhem and hyper-meta goofing, I kinda did care about the characters, especially in the finale, which unspools a pathos firehose and blasts us with it.”

IGN gave is a solid 7/10 review, calling it “an outrageous, consistently funny superhero comedy that succeeds largely thanks to the contagious enthusiasm of leads Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.”

Daily Beast’s sentiments are echoed fairly widely. It’s not without problems but Deadpool & Wolverine is probably the best MCU film in years. “Less than the sum of its parts—a collection of unexpected and comical gags strung together by a haphazard plot. Still, it’s more amusing and electric—more alive—than any MCU instalment in years.”

The Independent gave the film a 2/5 rating: “Deadpool & Wolverine is as much fun as you can conceivably have at a corporate merger meeting. It’s tedious…”

The Telegraph didn’t like Deadpool & Wolverine at all, giving it just a single star: “a simpering, smirking movie that feels like a spiritual dead end for the franchise.”

Deadpool & Wolverine reviews run the gamut, then. None of the big outlets have given it a five-star rating, though, and some of the least enthused reviews’ scores are very low.

Now it’s all eyes on the film’s box office to see how tired the cinema-going public really is of the MCU. Some hope Deadpool & Wolverine could be only the second R-rated movie to blast past a billion at the big screen after Joker.

Deadpool & Wolverine hits US cinemas on July 26, while there are midnight screenings in the UK on the day we write this, July 24.

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