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This article contains Deadpool & Wolverine Spoilers.
It’s something fans have waited 20 years for when it comes to Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, even if they didn’t know it. No, not the costume. We always knew we wanted to see Jackman in that little yellow and blue number. And when the mask came on during the third act of Deadpool & Wolverine, the roof of my particular theater strained from the high-decibel cheers.
As beautiful as that costume was while watching Wolverine go on a Madonna-scored berserker rage, we have seen Jackman’s most beloved onscreen character up to his knees in blood splatter before. We have also seen him attempt to sacrifice himself for the world, or at least a handful of loved ones in it, be it in X-Men when he risked dying of slash wounds in order to transfer his healing factor to Anna Paquin’s Rogue, or in Logan where he 100 percent kicked the bucket for his genetically engineered daughter, Laura (Dafne Keen).
When all those old familiar beats played again in 2024, it was like seeing an old friend telling one of his favorite yarns. So it’s what came after Logan and Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) saved the world by holding hands that felt like something new and unexpected: at last we have Wolverine who has found peace, who’s found contentment. Finally, Wolverine gets his very own happy ending.
Hear us out. While the various X-Men and Wolverine flicks Jackman appeared in during the 2000s and 2010s almost uniformly had happy endings—with one glaring exception—Jackman’s Logan has himself always been a tragic character within them. Like Ethan Edwards, the lonely cowboy unable to come in through the doorway and know civilization, kinship, and family, Logan is a classic archetype who is left alone on the fringes. In the first couple of X-Men flicks, he was trying to find some sense of identity, but by the time he killed Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey with his own hands in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), it was all downhill. The one exception, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), saw Logan save the world and his friends, but he still must live alone with that knowledge—sharing it solely with his aging father figure.
Which is why the end of Deadpool & Wolverine appears to be playing into that familiar expectation when Reynolds’ Deadpool asks, “I’ll see you around?” after saving the multiverse with him. Logan just grimaces “probably not.” Wolverine will instead be off to live alone with his regrets. It’s what he, and we, expect. So what comes next is like a minor revelation.
Pulling a page from Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Wade invites the Wolverine home to dinner. There we see all of Wade’s favorite returning side characters—Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), Dopinder (Karan Soni), and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand), included. But we also see Logan and, even more shocking, Dafne Keen’s Laura, all grown-up and smiling with her old man… or at least a variant of him.
In retrospect, this should be obvious. After all, if Wade’s good deeds won him a trip outside of the Void and back home, why wouldn’t X-23 get the same deal since she is also from this timeline? Still, it’s an unnatural ending for Wolverine, be it the one Jackman played in 2000 or his yellow-clad doppelganger. He is sitting there smiling. Happy. A father.
Deadpool & Wolverine makes no bones about the sacred ground it’s desecrating in doing this either. The movie literally begins with Wade Wilson digging up the Wolverine we all know and love, and doing an Abbott and Costello routine with his skeleton. That irreverence doesn’t change the fact the movie is committing a small act of cinematic sacrilege. It is intentionally adding an addendum, an amendment, a literal postscript on a perfect superhero movie ending. And in doing so, it gives audiences what they wanted in 2017 but which always seemed like a false hope: a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as illusory as Alan Ladd’s Shane dreaming he could live in the valley with Joey’s family.
In Logan, Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier tells his surrogate son the following: “This is what a life looks like: a home, people who love each other, a safe place. You should take a moment and feel it. Logan, you still have time.” It was a beautiful idea, but one we know can never be for our guy. Indeed, the family Charles and Logan look wistfully after are brutally murdered later that night by a literal clone of Wolverine’s demons.
And yet, that happiness Jackman and James Mangold so eloquently suggested was impossible for the Wolverine, Reynolds’ traditional bag of fairy dust has made a reality. At the end of Deadpool & Wolverine, Logan is surrounded by people who love each other. He is in a safe place. He is home. And he’s even got the dog to prove it.
Does this make Deadpool & Wolverine a particularly deep or heartfelt ending? Not really. It is perfectly in keeping with Deadpool’s tone for there to be a happy ending, even if it’s with characters we didn’t spend more than five minutes with at the start of the movie. And for that matter, any emotional resonance between Logan and Laura’s relationship in Deadpool & Wolverine comes from the delicate tragedy they played seven years ago in Logan.
Nonetheless, this entire movie is built on the foundations of the affection we already have for these characters from a dozen other movies across 20 years. And the heart of nearly all of them has been Jackman’s often melancholic and bittersweet performance. So to see him finally find a measure of peace, family, and home, with a half-cloned daughter and the Merc with a Mouth, is a genuine happy ending. After all these years, we’re home.
Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters now.
The post The Deadpool & Wolverine Ending Gives Us a Logan We’ve Never Seen Before appeared first on Den of Geek.
