We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE (2024)
In 2019, The Walt Disney Company, which is home to Marvel Studios and the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, acquired 21st Century Fox, the company that had been making adaptations of Marvel’s X-Men comic books without the involvement of Marvel Studios. As soon as that acquisition went through, the popular assumption was that the book had been closed on Fox’s X-Men universe and we would never be seeing their versions of the characters again. We wouldn’t be seeing the X-Men characters again until Marvel rebooted and recast them for the MCU... Except for one character, of course. While Fox’s X-Men movies had sputtered out anyway and Hugh Jackman had retired from the role of Wolverine as of 2017’s Logan, where his character was killed off, one character who was still going strong was Deadpool, as played by Ryan Reynolds. Marvel quickly confirmed they would be making a Deadpool 3 that would see the character entering the MCU, and it would be rated R just like his two Fox movies.
Deadpool is a meta character who is just as knowledgeable about the comics and movies he’s in as any reader or viewer who keeps track of all the latest news, so it made sense that he would be the one who could pass from one universe to another. At first, Marvel apparently only wanted Deadpool to carry over from the existing movies, with his supporting cast left behind – but Reynolds convinced them to make the movie more of a direct sequel than Marvel was initially hoping for. Wendy Molyneux and Lizzie Molyneux-Logelin were hired to write the Deadpool 3 script in 2020... but things changed in a major way in August of 2022, when Jackman reached out to Reynolds and revealed that he was interested in coming back as Wolverine for a team-up film. That was an idea so appealing that no one could resist it. The project instantly became Deadpool & Wolverine, and ended up having a screenplay crafted by the team of Reynolds, Zeb Wells, returning Deadpool and Deadpool 2 writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and director Shawn Levy.
And what that team delivered with this movie is something completely unexpected: a movie that crosses over into the MCU in a way that makes it so that the MCU project it’s primarily tied to is the Loki TV series, while also becoming a heartfelt tribute to the Marvel Comics adaptations that happened outside of the MCU. Not just the X-Men films, but also the likes of Fox’s Fantastic Four movies, Fox’s Daredevil and Elektra movies, and New Line Cinema’s Blade trilogy.
The story finds Deadpool, a.k.a. Wade Wilson, down on his luck and down on himself. After crossing between universes to make an unsuccessful attempt at joining The Avengers in 2018, he quit the superhero game, broke up with his girlfriend, and became a used car salesman. But then the Time Variance Authority, an organization (which exists outside of time) that was introduced on Loki and prunes unwanted timelines and universes from existence, comes barging into his life. TVA agent Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfayden) informs Wade that his universe has lost its Anchor Being. When this happens, the whole world begins decaying and withering out of existence. This usually takes thousands of years to happen, but Paradox intends to speed up the process with a Time Ripper machine that will make it happen in just a few days. This means Wade has just 72 hours to save his universe, the Fox X-Men universe... and if he doesn’t, everyone he cares about will cease to exist.
Of course, the Fox X-Men universe’s Anchor Being was Wolverine. The character’s death in Logan is the reason why the universe is now collapsing. So Wade sets out to give the universe back its Anchor Being – and he goes on a multiversal quest to find a new Wolverine for his world. As he jumps from universe from universe, we see multiple variants of Wolverine – most of which are played by Hugh Jackman, one of which is played by Henry Cavill – and then he finds his candidate with a version of Wolverine that wears the character’s classic yellow costume that never made it to the screen before and is described as being the worst Wolverine. He’s a drunken wash-out, a Wolverine that let his entire world down. But he’s Deadpool’s greatest hope.
Unfortunately, Paradox just prunes Deadpool and Wolverine to the Void, a wasteland at the end of time that is ruled over by a powerful telekinetic / telepath named Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), the twin sister of X-Men founder Charles Xavier. So our heroes have to figure out a way to get past Nova so they can escape from the Void and save Wade’s world from the Time Ripper. Along the way, they cross paths with some familiar faces from the X-Men films, including Aaron Stanford as Pyro and Tyler Mane as Sabretooth, variants of multiple other characters, a whole lot of Deadpool variants, a Fantastic Four character... and, in the coolest turn of events, a group of resistance fighters that consists of Dafne Keen as her Logan character X-23 / Laura, Jennifer Garner as Elektra, Wesley Snipes as Blade, and Channing Tatum as Gambit. It was great to see Laura again and it’s cool that Tatum finally got to play Gambit, as he had a Gambit movie that was stuck in development hell for years at Fox... but it was surprisingly heartwarming to see Garner get a chance to give closure to Elektra, which I didn’t even realize was something I wanted to see so badly. And it was incredible to see Snipes play Blade one more time, twenty years after his trilogy came to an end. I never expected to see Garner as Elektra or Snipes as Blade again – and I definitely never would have thought Snipes’ return to the role of Blade would be in a Ryan Reynolds project, since it’s well known that Snipes and Reynolds did not get along on the set of Blade: Trinity. It’s wonderful that they let bygones be bygones and made this happen.
Deadpool & Wolverine is a wild multiversal adventure that delivers a lot of laughs, a ton of great fan service, some very cool action, and also has some touching emotional content. Jackman thought he was done with Wolverine, but then he came back and gave one of his best Wolverine performances in this movie. I have had a lot of fun watching this movie multiple times. If someone had seen into the future to put together a description of this movie and tell me all about it years ago, I would have said that it sounds like something that could never, ever exist. But it does, and I’m very happy that it does.
SAFE (2018)
I have spent a whole lot of time watching Michael C. Hall and listening to his voice over the last year or so. A binge through the five seasons of the TV series Six Feet Under was followed by a journey through all eight seasons of Dexter, plus the follow-up season Dexter: New Blood – and then the first season of the prequel series Dexter: Original Sin, which Hall doesn’t star in but does provide the narration for. So when I decided to check out the mini-series Safe, it was jarring at first – because Hall, who is an American (born in North Carolina) and played American characters in all of those seasons of Six Feet Under and Dexter, plays a British man in Safe, accent and all! Hall seemed to do a fine job with the accent, at least as far as my American ears could tell, but still, I spent the first episode wondering why the character had remained British after Hall was cast. Couldn’t he have just been an American ex-pat in this England-based story? I got over it eventually. If we can have British actors playing the likes of Superman and Spider-Man and a Texan actress playing Bridget Jones, I guess it’s fine to have Michael C. Hall playing some random British surgeon.
Created by crime author Harlan Coben and primarily written by Danny Brocklehurst, Safe sees Hall taking on the role of Tom Delaney, a surgeon whose wife passed away one year earlier – and the way he handled his wife’s final days was very upsetting to the oldest of his two daughters, 16-year-old Jenny (Amy James-Kelly). Jenny attends a party thrown by her drug-dealing classmate Sia Marshall (Amy-Leigh Hickman), and by the end of the night both Jenny and her 19-year-old boyfriend Chris Chahal (Freddie Thorp) have gone missing.
So, at the heart of Safe’s eight episodes is Tom’s search for Jenny, and while he investigates her disappearance, we branch out to learn about other characters. These include Tom’s police officer girlfriend Sophie Mason (Amanda Abbington), Sophie’s new partner Emma Castle (Hannah Arterton), Tom’s best friend Pete Mayfield (Marc Warren), Sia’s parents Jojo and Lauren (Nigel Lindsay and Laila Rouass), Chris’s French teacher mother Zoé (Audrey Fleurot), Chris’s dad Neil (Joplin Sibtain), ‘80s-themed bar owner Bobby Roberts (Milo Twomey), Tom’s younger daughter Carrie (Isabelle Allen), and more. Nearly every character does something at some point to question whether or not they’re law-abiding citizens, and some of them are clearly up to criminal activities.
There are frozen corpses, bloodstained shirts, party videos, scandalous pictures, phone tracking, knife-wielding youths, secrets that have been buried for years... there’s so much going on in Safe and so many characters to follow, there was a time during my watch-through where I started feeling like I needed a diagram to keep track of who everyone was and what they were up to. But even when I was feeling a bit of information overload, I was thoroughly wrapped up in the mystery and eager to see where it was all going to go.
A whole lot of Harlan Coben shows have been made in recent years, and if this is indicative of the average Coben story, I can see why they’re so popular. I found Safe to be fascinating and enjoyed by binge-viewing of its eight episodes. After I adjusted to the sight and sound of Dexter doing a British accent.
BEEF SEASON ONE (2023)
Created by Lee Sung Jin for the Netflix streaming service, the ten-episode series Beef begins with an act of road rage. When contractor Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) nearly backs his truck into the SUV being driven by small business owner Amy Lau (Ali Wong), he’s enraged that she honks her horn at him – kicking off an idiotic car chase. And since both Danny and Amy are dealing with highly stressful situations in their lives, they’re not content to just leave the incident at that. Danny tracks Amy down, talks his way into her house with some contractor speak, and urinates all over her bathroom. In turn, Amy tracks Danny down, giving his business bad reviews online, vandalizing his truck, and catfishing his younger brother Paul (Young Mazino) on social media.
The situation continues to spiral out of control from there, with Amy getting closer to Paul than she should while her marriage to her stay-at-home husband George Nakai (Joseph Lee) crumbles and Danny teaming with his criminal cousin Isaac (David Choe) on get-rich-quick schemes. The issues and complications build and build as the episodes go on – and by the end, it’s truly jaw-dropping how far off-track Amy and Danny’s lives go simply because of a dumb moment of road rage.
It’s also very interesting to watch the lives of these characters spin out, and there’s also a great element of humor to the show, which is described as both a black comedy and a psychological thriller. It’s easy to binge your way through this one, and it’s also easy to see why it swept the Primetime Emmy Awards, winning in acting categories (for Yeun and Wong) and in the Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series category. It won that award at the Golden Globes as well. I heard a lot of hype about Beef before checking it out, and when I did watch the show, I found that it lived up to the hype.
This was supposed to be a one-and-done show, these ten episodes were all that were supposed to exist. But Beef proved to be so successful, Lee Sung Jin and Netflix decided to continue their working relationship by turning the show into an anthology. This was just season 1. There will be another season that will follow an all-new group of characters, and I look forward to seeing what’s going to happen to them.
YOU SEASON FIVE (2025)
Although the thriller series You was apparently always intended to be a “five season journey,” showrunner Sera Gamble decided not to guide the journey to its conclusion. She remained attached to the final season of the show as an executive producer, but passed the showrunner duties over to fellow executive producers Michael Foley and Justin W. Lo. Thankfully, Foley and Lo were no strangers to You. They had been working on the series since season 1 and season 2, respectively. So they knew what they were doing, and they delivered a very satisfying conclusion – and made sure the last season dealt with the consequences of the events of the first season in a very direct way.
The first season followed New York City bookstore manager Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) as his quest for love took him down the path of becoming a serial killer. He had to go on the run and use different names over the next few seasons, but You season 5 brings Joe back to New York City, having cleared his name and added billions to his back account thanks to his relationship with Kate Lockwood (Charlotte Ritchie), who became CEO of her father’s massive company the Lockwood Corporation after Joe killed her father. Things have been peaceful for three years. Joe and Kate are married, they’re raising his young son Henry (Frankie DeMaio), Joe now owns the bookstore he used to work in, and no one has been killed in years. Of course, that all changes as of the first episode. Some members of the Lockwood board – which includes family friend Buffalo Bob Cain (Michael Dempsey), Kate’s brother Teddy (Griffin Matthews), and Kate and Teddy’s twin sisters Reagan and Maddie (both played by Anna Camp, who brings great energy and humor to her scenes) – are making moves against Kate, trying to get her ousted. And to help his wife in this power struggle, Joe goes back to killing people and/or keeping them locked in the glass cage he has in the basement of the bookstore.
And when Joe and Kate start having relationship issues, Joe’s eye is caught by a young woman who calls herself Bronte (Madeline Brewer), who has been hanging around his bookstore and even breaking into the place at night to take books. Joe comes to think he’ll be able to transition into a “happily ever after” with Bronte – but diving into a relationship with this girl proves to be much more difficult than expected... and there are also anti-Joe forces conspiring against him. Wanting him to pay for the crimes that he has, with the aid of Kate’s money, managed to sweep under the rug.
Unresolved issues from previous seasons are resolved on the way to an ending that feels very fitting for the five-season journey this show took us on. Aside from some missteps in season 4, You is a great series. I’m going to miss it, as I would have gladly watched more seasons, but it wrapped up well and feels complete.
And I know Penn Badgley doesn’t really like bringing Joe Goldberg to life and is glad to be able to walk away from him... but he has done an incredible job playing this guy, and if he ever decides to do some sort of revival season, I would definitely tune in to watch more You.
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