I'm Still So Confused by Gambit in 'Deadpool & Wolverine'
Is it a joke? Is it an honor? Is it an honor to be a joke?
Deadpool & Wolverine was, unsurprisingly, stacked with cameos, and to Marvel’s credit, they kept a chunk of them under wraps. However, with the film now the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time, the studio clearly felt they weren’t risking spoilers by making those cameos public. Actors felt comfortable sharing their participation, and among them was Channing Tatum, who played Gambit in the movie.
Gambit may be the deepest fan service in the movie. I’m trying to imagine someone who doesn’t read any superhero movie news watching the scene where he appears. You first have Jennifer Garner, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah. She was Elektra in Daredevil.” Then you have Wesley Snipes, “Blade, sure, obviously.” And then in strolls Channing Tatum and the best I assume a casual moviegoer could do at that moment is, “I guess Channing Tatum played a superhero? In which movie? Did I miss a film?”
You didn’t!
A bit of backstory: Gambit is an X-Men character who rose to popularity throughout the 1990s thanks to his presence in the relaunched X-Men comic book as well as the animated series. He appeared once before in the X-Men movies played by Taylor Kitsch in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Then, in 2014, Tatum signed on to play the role where he would appear in X-Men: Apocalypse before getting his own spin-off movie. Neither of these things happened. The standalone Gambit movie starring Tatum kept churning through development hell with different directors including Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), and Gore Verbinski (the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies), but never getting to the shooting stage. By the time Fox (which owned the character as part of its X-Men rights) was sold to Disney in 2019, there was no hope for the project moving forward as it would have to fit within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The idea behind Tatum’s presence in Deadpool & Wolverine is that, like other characters in the film, he comes from a different universe within the movie’s multiverse conceit (Deadpool trashing multiverses while fully embracing its existence as a multiverse movie is one of the movie’s many instances of lampshading). However, his is “a story that’s never been told,” and so there’s this unspoken gratitude on screen between Tatum and producer/co-writer/star Ryan Reynolds (later articulated in an Instagram post by Tatum) that Tatum’s Gambit finally made it into a movie.
And yet I’m so confused by what this Gambit represents. I like Tatum as an actor, but the way he plays Gambit in Deadpool & Wolverine seems purposefully terrible. In the comics, Gambit is Cajun and speaks as such using a heavy Cajun dialect. Coming out of Tatum’s mouth, it sounds laughably bad to the point where Deadpool makes a joke about how no one can understand what Gambit is saying. This is on top of a costume that, while comic-accurate, also accentuates how the design of the character has always been extra from his weird cowl to his chest armor to his knee armor coupled with a trench coat. I’m not a fan of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but at least that Gambit looks pretty normal as opposed to a bunch of random superhero pieces slapped onto a guy.
Because Deadpool & Wolverine leans heavily into comedy, it’s no surprise that it would make jokes at Gambit’s expense, but then how can the film then turn around and say it’s honoring Tatum’s take on the character? Was Tatum going to play the role so bad that it would have been constantly distracting? Did every Gambit director sign on, hear Tatum’s stab at a Cajun dialect, and walk off? If anything, seeing Tatum’s Gambit on screen seems like an illustration of how being 100% comics accurate can be a drawback (something Deadpool & Wolverine also notes when Deadpool goes multiverse-hopping to find a Wolverine and comes across a comically short version that is accurate to the comics noting he’s only five-foot-three).
This impossible reconciliation of reverence and irreverence that the Deadpool series has always struggled with is so clear in the Gambit character that it makes my brain short-circuit. Perhaps in the minds of Reynolds and Tatum, when you love something, you show that affection by mocking it. It’s all in good fun, but that only gets you so far because you need to establish affection before mockery. You can’t go up to a stranger and start clowning on them like you would your best friends, but that’s exactly how Deadpool & Wolverine approaches Gambit. The film is so eager to lead with jokes that it assumes all affection is already preexisting when in reality we have never seen Tatum as this character. The joke and the reverence fail to work because the movie doesn’t understand anything beyond reference. Like most of Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s a pat on the head for being a superhero fan. Look any closer than that and it will blow up in your face.
Tatum is not attractive enough to be a good Gambit. Young Ian Somerhalder who actually has Cajun ancestry could have done it.