Tag Archives: Ryan Reynolds

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024, directed by Shawn Levy)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having been rejected for membership in the Avengers, the merc with a mouth is no longer a merc. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) has broken up with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and he now sells used cars. What he really wants is to be a member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Blind Al (Leslie Uggams) keeps doing cocaine even though Kevin Feige has forbidden it. Things aren’t going well for Deadpool until he’s contacted by Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), who explains that Deadpool’s timeline is decaying because of the death of Logan (Hugh Jackman), the character who was holding everything together. Paradox is willing to send Deadpool over to the main “Sacred Timeline,” but when Deadpool realizes that his current universe is going to end and all of his friends are going to die, Deadpool decides to resurrect Logan and save the day.

Deadpool & Wolverine answers the question of what happened to all of those characters from the Marvel movies that weren’t produced by Disney. It turns out that they’re all in the Void, where they’re ruled over by Professor X’s twin sister, Cassandra (Emma Corrin). Jennifer Garner shows up as Elektra. Wesley Snipes proves once again that he’s the only actor who should ever play Blade. Chris Evans plays not Captain America but instead a useless Johnny Storm. This being a Deadpool film, our hero can’t resist expressing his disappointment over not getting Evans as Cap. Deadpool & Wolverine becomes a commentary on just how many Marvel films there were before Robert Downey, Jr. declared “I am Iron Man,” and how most of them, with the exception of the X-Men films, were swept under the rug once the MCU became a cultural juggernaut.

Of course, Logan eventually returns. There are many different versions of Logan, just as there are many different versions of Deadpool, but eventually the right Deadpool finds the right Logan. Reynolds and Jackman bring an interesting dichotomy to the film. If Ryan Reynolds spends the entire movie commenting on how the MCU has become, even in decline, an unstoppable beast, Jackman reminds us that he was one of the first actors to prove that a comic book character can be played with real emotion.

Violent, profane, and very funny, Deadpool & Wolverine was a hit at a time when the MCU seemed to be really struggling. Rewatching it, I was reminded that the success of Deadpool really is a reflection of just how cynical a lot of us have gotten about comic books and the MCU. Deadpool exists to point out all of the things that we’ve noticed, and sometimes it feels like Disney is expecting too much credit for acknowledging its problems without actually fixing them. Fortunately, the team of Reynolds and Jackman is so strong that it’s hard not to just go with them. (You only have to watch the She-Hulk series to see how bad an attempt at meta commentary can be when you don’t have the right people.) With this film, Deadpool and Logan announce their arrival in the MCU, and it’ll be interesting to see where this all leads.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, directed by Gavin Hood)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Decades before he joins the X-Men, James “Logan” Howlett (Hugh Jackman) is just another mutant with retractable claws and a super-healing ability that essentially makes him immortal. With his half-brother Victor Creed (Liev Schreiber), Logan fights in wars throughout the centuries. When both Logan and Creed (who share Logan’s healing abilities) survive being executed by a firing squad, they are recruited by William Stryker (Danny Huston) to serve as members of Team X. Eventually, Logan tires of being an assassin and goes off on his own. However, both Stryker and Creed have plans for him and all the other mutants that they’ve captured or killed over the years. Several familiar characters appear—Scott Summers (Tim Pocock), Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), and the Blob (Kevin Durand) amongst others—but none of them have much of the personality that made them popular to comic book readers. (Just imagine including Gambit in an X-Men film but not Rogue.) Those who made it to the end of the film were given a Patrick Stewart cameo, albeit one that used CGI to de-age Stewart and make him look like an automaton.

With the majority of the X-Men either dead or cured at the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, it only made sense to spin Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine off into his own series of films. Unfortunately, 20th Century Fox didn’t understand that the thing that made Wolverine so interesting as a character was that his past was shrouded in mystery. Their first Wolverine film revealed his origin and it turned out to be not that interesting. X2 had been filled with so many hints about Wolverine’s past that the origin story didn’t feel as if it was telling us anything that we hadn’t already figured out. Even the many fight scenes between Sabretooth and Wolverine felt dull because it was established that both of them were essentially immortal and impervious to pain.

Today, this movie is mostly remembered for featuring the first appearance of Wade Wilson, the mercenary who will eventually become Deadpool. There’s very little of Deadpool to be found in this film’s version of Wilson. He tells a few jokes before getting his lips sewn shut. Imagine introducing a character who is affectionately known as “the merc with a mouth” and then rendering him silent for the majority of the movie. In Deadpool 2, there’s a scene where Deadpool goes back in time and kills this earlier version of Wade Wilson (or Weapon XI as he’s called here). The audience I saw the film with cheered.

Here’s The Trailer for IF

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

John Krasinski has gone from being the cute smirky guy on  The Office to an action hero to a legitimately good horror director.  Next year, the Krasinski saga will continue with IF, a comedy that he has written and directed about a father, his daughter, and a host of “imaginary friends.”

The trailer dropped today and it’s cute enough to be interesting.  A bearded Ryan Reynolds plays the father and it appears that a host of familiar names will be voicing the IFs.

Retro Television Reviews: When Friendship Kills (dir by James A. Conter)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1996’s When Friendship Kills!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

After the divorce of her parents, Lexi Archer (Katie Wright) moves to Seattle with her mother (Lynda Carter).  Lexi is having a tough time adjusting to the divorce, especially since her father (Josh Taylor) is convinced that he’s a better parent than Lexi’s mother has ever been.  Still, Lexi is hoping to make a good impression at her new high school and she gets off to an effective start by not only winning a spot on the school’s volleyball team but by also becoming friends with the most popular girl in school, Jen Harnsberger (Marley Shelton).

The wealthy Jen is a straight-A student and a star volleyball player and she appears to have a very bright future ahead of her.  Jen not only shows Lexi around the high school but she also shows Jen that one way to eat without gaining weight is to throw up after every meal.  Jen is bulimic and soon, Lexi is anorexic.  Eventually, Lexi is collapsing on the volleyball court and Jen is angrily denying that she has a problem and the whole things leads to tragedy.

Obviously, eating disorders are a serious issue and When Friendship Kills is honest about not only the pressures that lead to so many girls and women developing body image issues but it also deals with the danger of having a relapse.  Growing up attending dance classes, I met and hung out with a lot of girls who had “tricks” for keeping their weight down and I recognized all of them in the characters of Jen and Lexi.  This film hits all of the usual plot points that we’ve come to expect from 90s films about eating disorders, from the volleyball coach saying that the already thin Lexi needs to lose weight to the scenes of Lexi staring in the mirror and seeing a distorted version of herself to Lexi’s father demanding that a feeding tube be used on his daughter, regardless of what Lexi’s mother might think.

That said, many viewers will find the most interesting thing about this movie to be that it features an early performance from Ryan Reynolds.  Reynolds plays the role of Ben, a friendly jock who asks Lexi out on a date.  Reynolds doesn’t do much in the film but he does show some hints of the amiable goofiness that would later become his trademark.  If one wanted to view this film as being a part of a Deadpool origin story, they certainly could.

As well, Lochlyn Munro also appears in the film!  It’s not really a melodramatic made-for-television movie unless Lochlyn Munro has a role.  In this particular film, Munro played a sleazy photographer who approached Jen and told her that she had the perfect look to be a model and invited her back to his studio.  Of course, when Jen brought Lexi to the studio with her, the photographer rather rudely announced that Lexi didn’t have the right look to be a model.  This led to Lexi refusing to eat and becoming hollow-eyed and skeletal and Katie Wright, it must be said, did a wonderful job portraying Lexi’s transformation from being hopeful to being haunted by her own self-image.  Marley Shelton did an equally good job of portraying Jen’s more cheerful style of self-destruction.

When Friendship Kills is an effective if predictable eating disorder film.  The film originally aired under the title A Secret Between Friends, which is a far more honest title than the over-the-top When Friendship Kills.  Friendship does not kill in this movie but self-starvation does.

Here’s The Trailer for Red Notice

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier today, Leonard shared the trailer for Uncharted. At the same time that the Unchartered trailer was dropping, the trailer for Red Notice was being released as well. To be honest, I kind of suspect that they’re both the exact same film. Maybe Red Notice is the European edit….

No, actually, they’re both separate films. But judging from the trailer, they both appear to take place in the same cinematic universe. Anyway, Red Notice stars Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot as rival things who end up woring for an FBI profiler who is, of course, played by Dwayne Johnson. It’s always interesting to me that whenever you real life FBI agents, they’re always these kind of nebbish accountant types but whenever they show up in a movie, they’re always played Dwayne Johnson. Dwayne Johnson’s never had to keep track of his money because, if he ever did run out of cash, the people of the world would come together to send him as much extra money as they could. Everyone understands that the world would be a much worse place without Dwayne Johnson.

I guess Red Notice is a wacky comedy time and Netflix has a pretty uneven history when it comes to wacky comedy but I do like all three of the stars so who knows?

Here’s the trailer!

Here’s The Trailer For Free Guy!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Free Guy is due to be released on August 13th. It stars Ryan Reynolds as a cheerful bank teller who discovers that he’s just a character in a ….

“Wait a minute, is The Truman Show?”

No, no. The Truman Show was about reality TV and it starred Jim Carrey, who was kind of annoying in the film, if we’re going to be honest. Free Guy is about someone who discovers that he’s a character in a video game and it stars the always wonderful Ryan Reynolds! So, as you can see, they’re totally different. Plus, The Truman Show was all about Truman trying to reach the real world, whereas Free Guy features Reynolds taking control of his artificial reality.

“So, it’s like The Matrix?”

Well, maybe. But it seems to be a lot less pretentious.

“Wreck-It Ralph?”

Uhmm, maybe….

Anyway, here’s the trailer!

Ryan Reynolds improves his game in the Free Guy Trailer

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

You have to hand it to Ryan Reynolds, he knows how to market his projects. In the course of a few days, he made an advertisement for a TV that linked to a new film and his gin company, Aviation Gin. He also made a separate commercial for Aviation Gin starring Monica Ruiz, who everyone knows as the wife in the Peleton ads. Now, 20th Century Fox reunites Reynolds and his Green Lantern co-star, Taika Waititi in Free Guy.

Free Guy has Reynolds playing an NPC (Non-Playable Character) in a Video Game that is due to be shut down. Using classic video game items like power ups, guns and dance emotes, Reynolds’ character decides it’s time to level up. While we’re not sure of where this all goes, it’s good to see Ryan bring some of that Deadpool flair under the Disney umbrella.

Free Guy, Directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night), is set to release on July 3, 2020.