The Avengers

Deadpool & Wolverine

26/07/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been going through a bit of a rough patch of late. Since the heady days of the Russo Brothers and The Avengers, where every film seemed to grab the box office by the jugular and shake all the money out, there’s been a distinct lack of focus, an inability to home in on a winning formula. Big changes are pending but, in the meantime, there’s Deadpool & Wolverine, the (ahem) 34th film in the MCU, which, like its two predecessors, is R rated. This means that there are plenty of expletives flying out of the screen and that the extended fight sequences are much bloodier than we might usually expect.

After failing auditions to join The Avengers and The X Men, Deadpool (Ryan Renolds) – or Wade Wilson, to use his off-duty name – has made an attempt to go straight. He now works as a used car salesman, wearing a toupee and favouring Hawaiian shirts in his leisure time. But he’s dragged back into the superhero world by Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen, riffing outrageously on a version of his character from Succession). Paradox works for the Time Variance Authority and is a sort of snarky Dr Who figure. He announces that Wade’s strand of time is deteriorating fast due to the death of Logan – or Wolverine – and that it is all going to come crashing down fairly soon, which means that Wade and his eight friends are going to die.

Unless of course, he can do something about it.

Wade manages to steal Paradox’s tempad and heads into the Marvel Multiverse (as you do), looking for another Wolverine to take Logan’s place. For some inexplicable reason, he settles on the one who’s a miserable alcoholic, who feels he has nothing to live for. Well, things can only get better, right?

It would be pointless to try and relate any more of the plot because, frankly, it’s incoherent, a thinly-veiled excuse for our two heroes to fight with each other (and occasionally enjoy a bit of a bromance) as they travel to a variety of different locations – including one that looks very much as though it’s been ripped off from Mad Max. (Naturally Wade mentions this. “Hey, looks a bit Mad Maxy, huh?”) As they travel, the duo repeatedly break the fourth wall, chatting directly to the audience, dropping references to various franchises, film studios and Marvel characters past and present. Much of this means very little to me (though a bunch of superfans in the screening I’m at laugh uproariously throughout, perhaps to demonstrate how multi-versed they are in all things Marvel.)

There are A LOT of cameo appearances by various actors, some of whom I recognise but most of whom I don’t. And there’s A LOT of fighting. The biggest problem for me with the latter is that the many protracted punch-ups I’m obliged to sit through are rendered utterly pointless by the fact that none of the characters can be killed, which neatly removes any sense of jeopardy there might have been.

It’s not all terrible. I actually chuckle at some of the one-liners and there’s an impressive performance by Emma Corrin as Cassandra Nova, the twin sister of Charles Xavier, who has an unfortunate habit of sticking her hands directly into people’s heads in order to er… read them. Of course, there’s the inevitable, supposedly nail-biting finale as Deadpool and Wolverine attempt to do… something… with a bunch of timey-wimey… things but, by this stage, I’m mostly looking at my watch wondering if the film is ever going to finish.

Maybe it’s just that I ran out of patience with Marvel a long while back, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who wishes that the Multiverse had never been invented. Apart from a couple of glorious animated exceptions, any film that ventures into those uncharted waters appears to founder and sink. That said, this screening is fairly well attended and we’ll see how much money Deadpool & Wolverine manages to pull in.

And we’ll wait to see what comes next. Kevin? Take your time.

3 stars

Philip Caveney

Patrick MacNee: An Appreciation

Unknown Unknown-1

26/06/15

It’s one of my earliest memories from childhood; sitting with my parents in the little living room of whichever RAF home we were in then, waiting for our favourite programme to start. A little flickering screen in the corner. And then that music, Laurie Johnson’s strident theme, the brass section blasting out four notes which seemed to quite literally trumpet the programme’s title. The Avengers! The Avengeeeeers! Then the black and white credit sequence, cutting edge cool in the 1960s. And finally the episode itself, a delicious slice of surreal cold-war spy fluff as John Steed and Emma Peel took on the villains in their own spectacular style. These days of course, the same title conjures up images of brawny superheroes clad in latex and blessed with underwhelming ‘special’ powers, but in those far off times, it meant something quite different.

There had of course been an earlier series with Honor Blackman as Cathy Gale, but I don’t really remember that as clearly. The second series is imprinted so perfectly in my memory, that even now, more than fifty years later, I can recall entire scenes, even lines of the witty dialogue. I know that I was absolutely besotted with Diana Rigg who seemed to me the very epitome of feminine mystique – lithe, pretty, intelligent and powerful enough to fell a villain with one perfectly timed karate chop (even if, in long shot, you could sometimes see that she had been cunningly substituted by a burly bloke clad in an ill-fitting leather jumpsuit.) And of course, I saw all the later incarnations. I never really warmed to Linda Thorson as Tara King, but I did like Joanna Lumley as Purdey in The New Avengers, almost as much as I despised Gareth Hunt as the perpetually smirking ‘bit-of-rough’ Mike Gambit.

Through it all, Patrick MacNee’s John Steed remained unchanged, suave, stylish, outfitted in Saville Row’s finest suiting, his trademark bowler hat in place and his deadly weapon (an umbrella) poised ready to take out the toughest opponent. (Apparently, the umbrella was McNee’s idea. He’d been a naval officer in the war and had emerged from the experience with an intense dislike of violence of any kind, so much so, that he steadfastly refused to be pictured with a gun. ‘I’ll carry an umbrella,’ he suggested at an early script meeting and everyone went along with that. It was an inspired idea.)

Of course, the problem with a successful show like The Avengers was the danger that it might typecast the stars. Rigg had no problem escaping its clutches, becoming a major star of the theatre, but McNee didn’t manage much else but some forgettable television and an occasional film cameo; a shady psychiatrist in Joe Dante’s The Howling, a delightful turn as Sir Dennis Eaton-Hogg in This Is Spinal Tap, even a decent showing in a Bond film, opposite Roger Moore in A View To A Kill. But John Steed would remain his signature role, as much a fantasy image perhaps as those created by his female co-stars. In real life, you suspected, you’d actually hate someone like John Steed. With his Gentlemen’s Clubs, his impeccable manners and his old style courtesy, he was, even in the swinging 60s, something of a dinosaur – but MacNee’s charming manner made you believe that underneath it all he was a really nice chap, that should you bump into him in real life, he’d be every bit as charming as his fictional counterpart.

It’s always a jolt when you read that one of your earliest heroes has died. MacNee was 93 years of age, which by any standards is (as Steed himself might have observed) a jolly good innings. Back in the day, we tended to sneer at television shows. It’s only recently that TV has had something of a renaissance and we wax euphoric about the likes of Breaking Bad and True Detective. But The Avengers was an example of television at its most groundbreaking. Re-watching that opening credit sequence on YouTube still gives me the same thrill I had when I was a little boy. And if Patrick MacNee will always be John Steed in the nation’s memory, well that’s no bad thing. Because in his own way, he was one of the greats.

Philip Caveney