Two dozen years and five presidential administrations ago, Hugh Jackman, in his first appearance as the feral, fast-healin’ Wolverine, cracked wise about the black leather togs he and his fellow X-Men wore into battle. 

“What would you prefer,” James Marsden’s Cyclops clapped back. “Yellow spandex?”

I’m not as ancient as the two centuries claimed by Mr. Knifey-Knuckles, but as someone who started reading The Uncanny X-Men when it had a cover price of $0.75, I may as well be. I recognized that joke about the spandex, back in Y2K (when the original X-Men premiered), as a reminder that there was a limit to how faithful Hollywood could, or should, be when adapting a long-running comic-book saga for a mainstream audience. And I bristled at the loud, performative laughter of my fellow nerds, signaling to one another that the joke was for us. It wasn’t that funny, bub.

A generation later, that constituency of loud-laughers is the mainstream audience. Marvel Studios has nurtured and rewarded it and is now, after several years of mediocre movies and deflating Disney+ spin-offs, determined to win it back. 

Which brings me to the artfully filthy, endlessly self-mocking Deadpool & Wolverine. The first X-flick to be set within the canonical Marvel Cinematic Universe is less a movie than a 127-minute, $200 million ouroboros, swollen with Muppets-style metacommentary about what a fan-servicing cash grab it is. But Jackman finally got his form-fitting yellow supersuit!

The long-delayed appearance of Wolverine’s canary-colored onesie—and the return of Jackman, who’d retired from the role with 2017’s stirring Logan before he ever got to wear it—has been a centerpiece of the movie’s marketing. It also turns out to be a major subject of Wade “Deadpool” Wilson’s (Ryan “Free Guy” Reynolds) fourth-wall-breaking narration. And of one of his sickest burns.

 “Friends don’t let friends leave home looking like they fight crime for the Los Angeles Rams,” he tells Wolvie. 

Because jokes this movie has got. You might not care about the yellow costume. You might not be swayed by the fact the film’s multiversal milieu empowers Reynolds, director and cowriter Shawn Levy, and their collaborators not only to resurrect long-dormant Marvel heroes like [REDACTED], but to corral stars whose long-rumored superhero turns never happened such as [REDACTED], and even coax a walk-on from [REDACTED] who in a surprise twist, plays [REDACTED] instead of [REDACTED]. If you care about precisely none of that, you might still find this thing a worthy diversion, just for the light-speed potty-mouthed quips. Surely no film from within the Disney megalith has ever given us so many euphemisms for masturbation—or so many jokes about Honda Odyssey minivans.

Me? I’m just here for Jackman.

He’s the best there is at what he does. And what he does is pretty nice! He’s not just the longest-serving cinematic superhero, he’s the best of them. He’s engendered so much goodwill, within and outside of the hit-and-miss X-films, that even the news that he was returning to the franchise after leaving it on such a high note was met with more curiosity than ire.

Jackman is excellent here, again, gamely playing along with jokes about his musical theater background, which is fair, and about his recent divorce, which feels below the X-logo belt. He brings a weight and resonance to Deadpool & Wolverine that it probably doesn’t need, and that no one else attempts. He’s not Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever back. He’s fully back, present and committed to the role and also fighting fit.

Does Deadpool & Wolverine deserve him? I don’t know. For me, Jackman’s cranky reluctant-hero schtick hasn’t worn nearly as thin over the course of eight X-pics (give or take a couple of cameos) as Reynolds’ motormouthed smarm offensive has in just three, but that’s a matter of taste. I don’t much care for the previous Deadpool movies, or for the character, or for the specific, early ’90s era of X-Men comics that spawned him. As an actor, Reynolds leaves me cold. But I can’t deny the commitment and passion he brings to the Deadpool cycle. I suspect its partisans will agree with me that this is the best of them by a Savage Land mile.

The plot, to the extent I could follow it, involves “Time Variance Authority” middle manager Paradox (a droll Matthew Macfadyen) dispatching Deadpool to recruit some alternate universe iteration of Wolverine to prevent the destruction of Deadpool’s timeline. I’m reliably informed this is a bit easier to follow if you’ve seen season two of Loki, which I have not. But even minus this presumably illuminating context, Paradox’s frequent mention of a device called a Time Ripper makes it clear we shouldn’t root for him.

Somehow this results in our bickering, bloodletting antiheroes finding themselves exiled to an interdimensional void called, um, The Void, which seems to have been designed on the assumption that Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga would be a much bigger movie. (This film spends considerable energy parodying that one, which few in its projected-to-be-huge audience will have seen.) 

The Void is ruled by Cassandra Nova, literally the evil twin of X-Man-in-Chief Charles Xavier, who is played by a glabrous Emma Corrin (formerly Princess Di on The Crown) in an admirably dastardly performance. A powerful psychic like her brother, she is fond of violating her victims’ minds by penetrating their skulls with her grubby digits. The sight of her fingers sticking out of someone’s face is more upsetting than any of Deadpool & Wolverine’s gnarly fight sequences. Levy stages melees with skill and visual wit, which wasn’t quite enough to stop my eyes from glazing over as the next two dozen redshirts get shish-kebabbed, even if some of them are embodied, or at least voiced, by extremely famous actors.

There was another movie that did all this—really, all of this—for the other big superhero conglomerate just a year ago: The Flash, and it wasn’t just a flop, people loathed it. (I liked it okay.) There are also the animated Spider-Verse movies, which handle all this multiversal mishegosh and character-history essentialism with more elegance than Deadpool & Wolverine, and significantly less face-stabbing. The Spider-Verse films also dare to be about something larger than just their own tangled lore. Deadpool & Wolverine resolutely does not. 

But I had fun at Deadpool & Wolverine. I only wish its makers could’ve manifested a Dougray Scott cameo. Look it up.

Deadpool & Wolverine (127 minutes, R) opens Thursday night at area theaters.