If you thought Deadpool & Wolverine would exercise one iota of patience before wheeling out its show pony – the return of Hugh Jackman to his X-Men origins – then you thought wrong. Shaun Levy’s threequel is but seconds into action when Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool brandishes the shovel with which he will dig up old man Logan’s grave. It’s a deliciously tasteless opening to an often tastelessly delicious film. Funny, brash and casually bloody, Except, hold up, the body within has wasted away. Just the skeleton remains. The bare bones of former glory. It feels apt and, for once, unironic. For all the gags here levelled at Marvel’s expense, this Merc hasn’t any of the answers for long-term rejuvenation.

Certainly, many of the problems abundant in almost every MCU release since Endgame pervade Deadpool & Wolverine. Jokes about overlong runtimes, frivolous cameos and dumb plotting hardly make a film shorter, sharper or smarter. There’s no denying that a significant majority of the gags land – and land hard – but there is an aftertaste, compounded by a sense of excess cineliteracy. When Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool asides to Wolverine (Jackman) that he’s joining ‘at a bit of a low point,’ he’s not wrong. Funny that the joke is, the more the film reminds of its actuality, the more you have to wonder who, or what, it is that audiences are laughing at. The carcass? You don’t need to know the box office receipts for The Marvels to have heard the heyday’s past.

And yet, Deadpool does know the fate of the studio’s biggest recent misses. That’s his schtick. He’s the hero best known for poking a glory hole through the fourth wall with a wink, before ultimately tearing it to shreds. Here, it’s skilfully, if not artfully, done and wields side splitters aplenty. Particular highlights include the offing of one Marvel legend, ostensibly for his budgetary demands, and the wicked image of a giant 20th Century Fox logo, half buried in the film’s Mad Max riffing cosmic cesspit, in which much of the action takes place. This is the first Disney produced X-Men film and there’s no room for mercy. Within minutes, Reynolds announces his character as ‘Marvel Jesus’.

First, however, the film finds Deadpool retired, a rejection from Avengers stalwart Hsppy Hogan (Jon Favreau) leaving him dejected and depressed. Notions of what it is to actually matter in this world prove a surprisingly effective emotional thoroughfare. With his suit hanging to waste, the unmasked Wade now works for the same car dealership at which his normie bestie and number one cheerleader Peter (Rob Delaney) thrives. It is Peter who holds onto the old red suit. It is he, alone, who believes Wade to have unfinished Deadpool business. He alone, that is, until TVA bigwig Mr. Paradox (a scenery chewing, and surprisingly camp, Matthew Macfadyen) has Wade kidnapped from his own birthday party on a Loki-like recruitment drive.

Paradox has been tasked with shutting down Wade’s reality, his variant timeline. The death of Logan has stripped the timeline of its anchor and implosion is an inevitability. Wade, having none of it, vows to fight back, sourcing an alternative Logan from a variant timeline but ultimately landing them both dispatched to the TVA’s cross dimensional garbage pit – they call it ‘the Void’. From here on, the plot falls into broad lockstep with that of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, with all the highs and lows that entails. Where Deadpool & Wolverine benefits from the same boundless possibilities as did Quantumania, it suffers the same sense of weightlessness. The stakes are as low as the humour is flippant. Indeed, when everything takes place in a non-reality, and you’ve no doubt your heroes will survive, there can be no jeopardy.

Deadpool & Wolverine risks, too, a lean toward the smug. Unlikely that it is that any viewer will enter the film from a vacuum, an absence of contextual understanding would render large swathes of the dialogue and action completely incomprehensible. So densely populated are the cameos, Easter Eggs and in-jokes that the film almost fails to function in its own right and on its own terms. This is not the sort of freewheeling character study from which you will emerge with a more intimate understanding and relationship with the central duo. Thelma and Louise escape the void only fleetingly more self-aware than when they entered, no matter how much fun they had in the process.

That’s all well and good. Deadpool & Wolverine will fly with the right audiences, which, by and large, remains a pretty massive one. And yet, it’s fun with strings attached. Deadpool is no longer an outlier in the MCU and, while there’s wisdom in redefining the franchise in his none-too-serious image, there’s risk too. A closing credits tribute to the Fox years exposes both the softer underbelly of the snark and a continued fixation with looking backwards. When Reynolds teases Jackman that Disney will make him work until he’s 90, it’s another joke that rings all too true. Just look at Dick Van Dyke.