After an immensely profitable opening weekend, Deadpool & Wolverine is on track to dominate the international summer box office. Clearly, it’s hit a sweet spot for audiences. It combines nostalgia for superhero movies past with a relentless barrage of witty acknowledgements that the whole genre, when you get right down to it, was all a bunch of crap anyways.

The crap theme is very thoroughly sustained by writer-director Shawn Levy. In the film, both title characters are depicted as down-and-out rejects, cast out of more respectable superhero circles. Wade Wilson aka Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) — back in a belated sequel to Deadpool (2016) and Deadpool 2 (2018) — is desperate for a shot at Avengers team membership. But he botches the job interview and winds up as the ultimate loser, newly single after his girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) breaks up with him. He’s left working as a used car salesman with a bad toupee staple-gunned to his head.

“It’s a hair system,” he insists. “Balayage.”