‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2’ (2017) ****/*****
The Marvel Universe somehow needs saving yet again
When director James Gunn and Marvel Studios released the first Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, it was a risky proposition. These were B-list Marvel characters who the mainstream had never heard of. They were being played by B-list actors who had never been the centerpiece of a big budget movie before. Not to mention, everything about the franchise just looked plain weird. Audiences really fell for the quirky weirdness of the Guardians franchise though, as well as all of its 70s pop tunes, and especially its lovable characters, so the first film made a whole truckload of money for the House of Ideas. All of this means that the second film, appropriately titled Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, is released not as a question mark, but as an exclamation point. It’s got serious buzz behind it, it’s got big expectations to live up to, and its got a very vocal and very particular fanbase who will revolt if they don’t like what they see. Thankfully for all involved, it does the job of serving up more of what everyone wanted quite well.
The last time we saw our Guardians, Groot (Vin Diesel) was recently reborn as a baby, Rocket (Bradley Cooper) was still running his mouth every chance he got, Drax (Dave Bautista) was still a big ball of murderous rage, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) was in a feud with her sister, and Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) was confronted with the mystery of who his real father is, and why he might be a powerful space man. This time around the whole gang is back, the mystery of who Quill’s father is gets solved pretty dang quickly (it’s Kurt Russell!), Gamora’s sister, Nebula (Karen Gillen), shows back up looking to ramp up their feud, the complex relationship the Guardians have with their arrow-slinging frenemy Yondu (Michael Rooker, who steals this whole movie) gets even more hard to pin down, and eventually everyone has to band together in order to guard the galaxy from an ancient god (little g) who’s looking to make it so that he’s the only sentient being left in the universe. Along the way there are jokes, there’s a new mixtape of toe-tapping music, and there are melodramatic fight sequences that help to bond our mismatched group of misfits even closer together as a family. Like I said, Vol 2 has most everything you could want from a Guardians of the Galaxy film.
This thing opens up hot right out of the gate. First there’s a little prelude where we meet some kind of digitally re-created version of 80s-era Kurt Russell, back when he was at the absolute height of his cool, and then we get sent right into the big Guardians of the Galaxy opening credits musical number, which seems like it’s going to be a thing with this franchise going forward. The title sequence is great this time around. It’s the perfect evidence that Gunn and the execs at Marvel truly understand what it is that works about this franchise — its personalities. What’s going on is that there’s a big battle waging between the Guardians and a giant space monster in the background of the frame, and what’s happening in the foreground is that Groot — now in extra adorable Baby Groot form — is busting a move to a carefully curated vintage pop jam, and we’re so delighted with how cute he is while dancing that we don’t even care that we’re missing what’s sure to have been a huge, spectacular fight. This gets to the heart of what makes the Marvel Universe movies so much more successful than nearly all the other superhero movies that get released — they understand that we’re here for the characters, and that we’ve seen so many chaotic special effects battle sequences at this point in our cinematic history that they’ve become visual noise that might still work as movie filler, but that can no longer be held up as the main attraction.
The Guardians movies might have the best characters of any Marvel property, and they’re certainly the group that has the best onscreen chemistry, so it’s not hard to hit a home run just by letting the audience watch them hang out. The flip side to Gunn and company understanding what works so well about this property and leaning into it so hard is that Guardians 2 comes up to the edge of overexposing what we like about these heroes though. Yes, Baby Groot is adorable, but when half of the movie is Baby Groot doing adorable things, the law of diminishing returns starts to rear its ugly head. Yes, it’s funny when big, gruff Drax says something goofy, but when every other thing that comes out of his mouth is something goofy, you start to lose the cognitive dissonance that made his goofiness funny in the first place. Guardians 2 doesn’t quite head over that edge of what the audience will accept without its charms becoming cloying or annoying, but it points to a danger that the inevitable Guardians 3 just might get there.
One thing that actually doesn’t work in this movie is Russell’s character. Past that first scene where he’s young and in his prime and acting like a charming rogue, his character becomes an outright bummer. He’s an exposition machine whose sole role in the film seems to be to prattle on and on to Quill about how he and his mother met back in the day, what he’s been up to on the strange planet he inhabits ever since he left his pregnant love back on Earth, and what the particulars are of the history, nature, and power levels of the big bad guy the Guardians have to fight. Every time he shows up on screen you know that you’re in for a boring scene of static explaining, and the result is that, for the first time ever, Kurt Russell has become the worst thing about a movie he appears in. The consolation here is that Rooker’s Yondu character gets so much to do, is so much fun to watch, and develops through such a legit character arc, that it kind of makes up for the missed opportunity that Russell represented. This is probably the biggest role of Rooker’s career, and he nails it.
That all-powerful bad guy who I’ve danced around the issue of explaining too much and the big showdown the heroes have with him is mostly shit, too. His motivations are just too generically world-conquering for him to be interesting, and the threat his all-encompassing power brings to the table is too esoteric for it to ever feel like our protagonists are ever in any real, grounded danger. The final fight becomes that same bit of weightless, meaningless visual noise that most superhero movies end on. People are thrown around like rag dolls without ever being hurt. The threat bears down on them from all angles in a big, confusing swarm, so you never get the kind of stakes and tension-building that comes from a great one-on-one fight. This has become a real problem for Marvel movies — their heroes are great, but their villains are just plot points who give the heroes something to do, and the vanquishing of them never really feels like it took all that much effort. No more superhero movie finales with a big, glowing Macguffin that’s trying to incinerate the universe, please. Find another kind of problem for these guys to solve.
Thankfully, Guardians of the Galaxy is an engine that runs on quips, personality, and the charm of its actors more than anything else, so its superhero action being less than thrilling isn’t enough to shut the machine down. People are going to go into this movie just wanting to be able to spend more time with the characters, and we get that, so the experience is overall a satisfying one. How long will those simple requirements be all that we need met in order for us to keep buying tickets to Guardians of the Galaxy movies though? Unless Vol 3 finds some kind of new hook to really get us emotionally involved in what’s going on with these admittedly lovable a-holes, this cash cow franchise could turn into a property on the downslope faster than Marvel Studios may be anticipating.
