At long last, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) has ed the Marvel Cinematic Universe... and he’s having his cake and eating it too. Deadpool & Wolverine is a movie with a pretty profound identity crisis. It wants to be a merciless piss-take of the standard mega budget Marvel blockbuster… while also just being a standard mega budget Marvel blockbuster, with all that it entails.

The story is perplexingly reliant on the Loki streaming series, steeped in the very multiverse gobbledegook that it tries, with mixed results, to skewer. Through a convoluted series of events, the Merc With A Mouth finds himself brought to the Hugh Jackman) to try and save his world, which sees the two of them going up against an incredibly powerful mutant, the psychic Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin).

For all the jokes at the MCU’s expense, this really is a Marvel movie through and through, right down to the underwhelming villain played by an actor giving it their all but let down by weak material. Jokes about the first act having too much exposition and the third act going on too long don’t work when the first act really does have too much exposition and the third act really does go on too long. Deadpool & Wolverine is at least 20 minutes longer than it should be, and a climactic action set-piece that feels like the final battle actually turns out to be something like the third-from-final.

The Marvel-ness reaches a peak with the inevitable, universe-destroying cataclysm, which completely undermines the smaller-scale, much more interesting character drama. Deadpool wanting to save his weird surrogate family and Wolverine grappling with his guilt and anger are compelling ideas, but they get completely drowned out by the threat of the universe blowing up. Jackman is great, trying mightily to lend some dramatic weight to all the silliness, but the constant tonal whiplash lets him down.

To be fair, the movie is extremely funny, and the now-mandatory fanservice cameos are mostly in the service of genuinely good jokes. Not all of them are winners and there’s one that feels like a serious mistake because of the tone issues it brings, but for the most part they do work well. Reynolds could probably play Deadpool in his sleep at this point, but he does have a near-perfect handle on the wisecracks and one-liners the character needs, and can deploy them with hilarious precision. And for all that the jokes at Marvel and Disney’s expense jar with the movie’s embrace of the MCU tone and style, the amount of piss they manage to get away with taking is genuinely quite impressive.

That being said, the jokes about Disney buying out 20th Century Fox do leave a really bad taste in the mouth. Oh boy! Deadpool can the MCU! That was definitely worth 3000 people getting laid off! On the other hand, there is a sincere and rather touching tribute to all the Fox superhero movies at the end, an acknowledgement that, as mixed a bag as they were, they were a significant part of this genre’s history. That uncomfortable clash of irony and sincerity reflects Deadpool & Wolverine as a whole; it’s a huge mess in many respects, but in the moment a very entertaining one. It won’t linger long in the memory, but it’s fun while it lasts.