Superhero movie fans of a certain age may recall a moment at the end of Avengers: Infinity War when big baddie Thanos snapped his gauntleted fingers and so ended half of the universe’s living things — including folks like Spider-Man, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange. For one brief darkling moment, you may have felt something — the presence of serious stakes, of possible death, of the sort of genuine ending forever denied those heroes in their original serialized medium of comic books. But most likely, by the time you left the theater, you were already coming to your senses: there was simply no way Marvel was about to leave that much money on the table. And maybe, in that moment, you hated yourself just a little bit for thinking like that: for letting yourself careen out of the story and into such craven considerations so quickly. For dispelling the magic of moviemaking by casting your thoughts upon the monetary machinations at the heart of all that onscreen heroism. All of which is to say that the third entry in the Deadpool franchise feels your pain and laughs heartily at it. For here is a film devoted to exposing and ridiculing the nothing-means-anything narrative trick of the multiverse — a gimmick that gets to have Logan’s noble death and feast on Hugh Jackman’s ageless abs, too — that at the same time revels in it. As Ryan Reynolds, er, Deadpool says to a variant of his old buddy Jackman, er, Wolverine, “They’re gonna make you do this until you’re 90!” After all, both these heroes are basically indestructible, thanks to their powers of regeneration, and the boys at the lab are getting better and better at the whole de-aging thing… So yes, ha ha, we open with Deadpool figuratively pissing on Wolverine’s grave by literally digging up his adamantium skeleton and using it to take out a horde of henchmen set on stopping him from saving the world. There’s a half-hearted feint toward motivation: the merc with a mouth wants to matter. And there’s a brief flirtation with the consequences of that desire. But mattering isn’t what matters here. Not even the action is what matters here. What matters here, as in the first installment, are the jokes. So many of them, crammed in from and spinning off in all directions. Many of them land. Some of them will most likely make you laugh. The effort and execution are impressive. At a certain point, the thought may occur: is this the real endpoint of the Marvel Universe, the thing toward which quippy Tony Stark in Iron Man was always tending? Might they be ready to mean what they say about the multiverse being exhausted? By negating Wolverine’s sacrifice, are they admitting their mistake and declaring an end to this nonsense? But most likely, by the time you leave the theater, you will already be coming to your senses. — Matthew Lickona