What really struck me was that he compared Deadpool & Wolverine to Blade?! So... Blade is the movie with "discernable purpose" and/or "artistic ambitions"? I mean, I liked Blade, but if the complaint is that Marvel movies aren't Citizen Kane, then Blade seems a weak comparison. So where does he draw the line?

Nah, he's read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and/or subscribes to Suber's ideas in The Power of Film and is doing a mental checklist of what Marvel lacks.

Marvel hits the main points of a Hero story most of the time -- where we have a Hero who comes from one place, goes 'adventuring' elsewhere and ends up doing a 'thing' that benefits the ordinary folks -- but the frequency of needing a HERO over and over, and the escalation of what's at stake (the whole world, the galaxy, universe, multi-verse, existence itself) means that after you've seen a few Marvel movies, the characters aren't doing things that are new or different from what they did in other movies. Saving 'normies' is their day-job. Yeah, the path is different each time, but we keep seeing the same Heroes and most of them aren't getting transformed by the journey and there are too many cases where the 'sacrifice' they make doesn't have any real choice involved (if you can opt walk away from the drama then staying or doing 'X' is a sacrifice, but it's no sacrifice if leaving means you die anyway).

Suber suggests that a hero often has to GO AWAY at the end of the story. The normies are happy for help, but then they want to get back to raising their kids and the Hero is not good for that. I like that idea. More than that, I think that is the critic's actual complaint. He sees this as another story in the same universe (multiverse) with the same characters and he wants something new rather than something comfortably familiar -- and that's HIS problem because lots of us would like more stories about the Heroes we've come to know and love.

If it matters, my favorite Marvel story is the Loki TV series. It hits many of the expected markers and both the lead-up to- and the actual-ending both really resonated for me.

It was entertaining, but it wasn't good enough to be in my top 10... or top 20.

Honestly, I am not sure who the target audience was for that movie after seeing it. It was just a mashup of plot points that tried to hit every major category for every viewer at the same time.

But... If Deadpool were to ever write a movie, that would probably be it.

I am the target audience, 50yo, grown up reading comics in the 70s/80s, love Star Wars, am nerd, computer geek, played zillions RPG, saw all the SW, goonies, ET, BTTF, mad max, terminator and all shwarzy movies in theater, etc. Seriously, MCU movies are somewhat bad, dull, some characters looks like impersonator, heroes in thigh, actors lack credibility, too often bad CGI, stories are empty, I realized comics from the 70s/80s are really story for kids. They are actions movies, but uninsteresting. At 50yo I prefer to do something else during those 2 hours.

studios being run by business vultures wanting short term massive returns only, even if it means no longer making anything else but trend chasing mega films

Two things on that:

• I've heard studios now count on international deals so movies must shy away from anything that would get them banned in the major markets
• the current age of cinema reminds me a bit of the precursor to the great 1970s film revolution where studios weren't making enough money, so they started letting anyone and everyone take a shot at making movies and lo! the public suddenly had a wide variety of all kinds of things to watch

I'm not sure we ever lost that variety, but no longer have the constraint of theater-only viewing that gets people to all see the same set of movies at the same time such that 'different' movies (like One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest or Star Wars as well as Smokey and the Bandit) were all getting attention and conversation at the same time.

Now we have streaming from services and we can wait to watch movies until they become available online, so many films miss the box-office and never get the hype they deserve because only the biggest have publicity junkets promoting them online and on chat-TV. So maybe the critic's actual issue is that -- as a paid critic -- he's forced to watch the publicized flicks designed not-to-offend and doesn't have the time to find all the other movies going under the radar.