National treasure Hugh Jackman is too good for Deadpool
In this column, we deliver hot (and cold) takes on pop culture, judging whether a subject is overrated or underrated.
By Mali Waugh
A long time ago, I completed a bachelor of arts. The skills I best developed during those heady years included essay composition (see below), feeling entitled to tell people older and wiser than me why they were wrong about complex issues, and being good at the internet. With that in mind, let me tell you about my newest discovery, unearthed in a period of intense procrastination.
In this humble YouTube clip, one gets to appreciate not only the earnestness of mid-90s Australian television but also the staying power of an Australian icon. For those short on data, the video opens with Daryl Somers, then host of Hey Hey Its Saturday, closing the show with his arm awkwardly and inexplicably wrapped around the shoulders of his co-host Jo Beth Taylor.
Did we really need Deadpool 3?
He looks down at his notes, looks up, looks down again, and with little fanfare and fleeting confusion introduces a youthful Hugh Jackman with Debra Byrne to promote the original Australian Sunset Boulevard production.
The song they perform, called A Perfect Year, involves Jackman and Byrne exchanging longing glances, singing in each other’s faces and then, between verses, cackling as they ballroom dance. The whole thing is delightfully deranged and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
It exemplifies why Andrew Lloyd Webber was probably not the best choice for a story of moral decay in old Hollywood (you can do nuance or you can do musical theatre, but never at the same time). It also proves that Hugh Jackman has always been perfect.
I ended up down this wormhole because Hugh Jackman’s face is everywhere at the moment. This, of course, is in service of the new Deadpool, which in turn, is in service of fans, somewhere, presumably.
I adored Deadpool in 2016 (simpler times, although not as simple as 1996). Watching a superhero movie that wasn’t painfully earnest and self-important was refreshing. The dialogue was, for the times, subversive; the fourth wall was broken constantly, and it wasn’t one of those “watch the world die in painstaking, computer-simulated detail” superhero experiences.
Ryan Reynolds had a glib kind of charm and the film was his passion project, and how nice for him to get a superhero movie that was popular after Green Lantern.
And then, in 2018, Deadpool 2 came out and it was the same as the first. That is, it was the same jokes about the fourth wall breaking and the Marvel v X-Men budget and Wade Wilson’s sexual ambiguity and his elderly housemate liking cocaine but with Josh Brolin instead of Ed Skrein and T.J. Miller being even more on the nose.
It became apparent to me in this iteration that a little bit of Ryan Reynolds goes a long way and that what is daring and fun in small doses can become grating and superficial over successive films.
The rapid-fire nature of the gags that was so impressive in the first instalment becomes tiresome after two hours of Deadpool 2 and I found myself wanting the guy to just sit down and stop talking.
This brings me to my other Deadpool gripe: neither Deadpool 1 nor 2 have any emotional depth or big stakes. The crumbling skyscrapers and screaming crowds in the Avengers and Batman films begin to look a bit better when you start to realise that in the Deadpool universe, kind of like our own, nothing really matters.
And now it is 2024 and we have lived, and we are old, and we are tired and yet Deadpool & Wolverine is upon us. The trailer lets us know what to expect: jokes about the fourth wall breaking and Marvel v X-Men budgets and Wade Wilson’s sexual ambiguity and his elderly housemate liking cocaine but also now starring Wolverine.
Is it all just me or does this seem a bit familiar? As though someone, somewhere, just wants to exhaust the final drops of potential from this IP teat before moving on to the next? And as though that same cynical person knew that there was a celebrity friendship that could be marketed to within an inch of its life?
Jackman will, presumably, reinvigorate things because he and Reynolds have delightful chemistry. They genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves both in the trailer and in the exhausting pre-release promotion they are doing.
But surely this is it for Deadpool, right? Shouldn’t it have wrapped after two? And are we being insulted or just given exactly what we deserve? And if so, is that insulting?
I want to be clear that I don’t begrudge any person, particularly Jackman, getting paid. We all have to do what we have to do, whether that is dusting off the old biceps and getting into a yellow Wolverine jumpsuit or writing snarky articles about same, but surely, our Jackman, one of the few exports that doesn’t evoke collective cringes, deserves better than Deadpool & Wolverine?
Yesterday I was on the train when an older man waiting by the doors apprehended a nearby woman and asked her whether she believed “boys could be girls and girls could be boys”. It was a bold opener and presumably he was arguing for the negative, as I don’t reckon that many people who believe that trans rights are human rights feel the need to bring it up with strangers on public transport.
It was a powerful reminder that the wrong search and two hours of unsupervised YouTube time can take anyone down the slippery slope into TERF World, but also that there are so few areas of commonality these days. Deadpool, aimed fairly and squarely at the nerd boys, will not be a unifying cultural touchstone. But Jackman, national treasure, Wolverine (ugh) and musical theatre icon could be.
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