Now your two favorite Canadian antiheroes come bundled, like cable! (Not to be confused with Cable, not included.)

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I’m the hypothetical boogey-moviegoer who lurked in the MPA’s hivemind imagination when they invented the PG-13 label! This prudish geek is back for another round of simultaneous enjoyment and irritation flared up from the inner turmoil between my oft-undiscerning appetite for comics-based movies that aim to deliver Something Different, versus my general disdain for F-bombs (with extremely few exceptions) and sex jokes (more adamantly unilaterally). I realize I’m outnumbered millions-to-one among geekdom-at-large, but I find ways to cope, such as typing into the void upon my tiny, mostly nonpaying hobby-job site.

I skipped the first Deadpool in theaters and instead watched it on a Black Friday Blu-ray with variant Christmas cover, where a smaller medium helped minimize its gratuitous indulgences. All the other parts of Tim Miller’s directorial debut were amazing, though, so I upgraded Deadpool 2 to a theatrical outing. The first one was better, but David Leitch delivered far more satisfying renditions of Colossus and Juggernaut than their half-baked mainline forms. I appreciated both films offering pleasures beyond the guilty kind, sometimes to an intentionally daffy extreme, which is not something that automatically bugs me. All told, the Merc with a Mouth’s two misadventures as a headliner were better than most X-films and, fun trivia, outgrossed them all.

Hence more of the same, but no longer confined to a licensed offshoot series that doesn’t “count”. One corporate merger and a few non-superhero films later, Ryan Reynolds and his entourage of masked stunt doubles are back! And this time, it’s more all the way! More fanboy pandering! More fourth-wall breakage! More pop culture references! More overplayed Top-40 oldies from across the decades! More F-bombs! More sex jokes, obsessively specializing in gay-panicky snark! But the more, more, MORE begins with its very title: Marvel Cinematic Universe After Dark! Wait, no, I mean Deadpool & Wolverine!

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