So it's a surprise to discover that this movie not only is actually About Something - it's not like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had any connection to any real world concerns at all, and fair enough - but the real-world issue it's tackling is experiments on animals, which is about as far as you can get from the fun-loving classic rock vibe the Guardians usually specialise in.
The topic comes up in the form of the never before mentioned backstory of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), who it turns out was the product of a lot of nasty experiments by the colourful yet sinister High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). Now he wants Rocket back, and has sent the super-powered but dim-witted Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), one of his more humanoid creations, to collect what he sees as his property.
Warlock trashes the Guardian's cyperpunk-esque space skull base, fails to collect his target, and leaves Rocket dying with no way for the Guardians to heal him thanks to a bunch of fail safes built into the tech that's part of his body. Looks like they're going to have to steal the codes to bypass the fail safes, and that heist is only the beginning (mostly because the movie goes for two and a half hours).
Rocket's plight is no barrel of laughs, and having Peter Quinn, AKA Star Lord (Chris Pratt) a heartbroken drunken mess thanks to the death, then revival from an earlier point in time when she didn't love him, of Gamora (Zoe Saldana) also cuts down on the quips - for a while at least.
So this is the grim and gritty Guardians pretty much nobody was asking for? Hardly, but the tonal whiplash is sometimes pretty severe as the story goes from Rocket and his tortured animal chums dreaming of freedom (good luck there) to the more traditional sitcom-style banter between Drax the Destroyer (David Bautista), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel, getting to enunciate a bit more this time) and Gamora's perpetually angry sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).
Throw in the usual big action scenes, a bunch of cameos, a few too many characters (if Warlock feels shoehorned in, the return of his mother is definitely surplus to requirements) a lot of needle drops (Beastie Boys fans get the extra thrill of finding out which lines Disney won't allow from 'No Sleep Till Brooklyn'), and an adorable subplot where Cosmo the space dog spends the entire film worrying that Kraglin (Sean Gunn) has called her a bad dog, and you have an overstuffed, often frantic film that's all over the place (and space).
Which is not unusual for the Guardians of the Galaxy. Writer / director James Gunn was briefly fired from Marvel in 2018 (dodgy tweets, obviously), leading to an odd MCU speedbump where Thor joined the Guardians, didn't fit in, and then almost immediately left and never looked back. There was also the recent Guardians Christmas Special for Disney+, which explains a few Kevin Bacon references in the end credits but is otherwise best left unmentioned.
This third and seemingly final installment is the kind of film with too much going on for everyone to like all the moving parts equally, but the high notes are high enough that the flat patches don't linger. It's not afraid to go directly for the tear ducts in all manner of ways; one death is a tragedy, the destruction of an entire inhabited planet is just something that happens as part of a day's work, and experimenting on animals is really, really bad.
Lately the more comedic Marvel movies seem to have embraced a kind of sloppiness in their storytelling as a way to amp up the energy. It doesn't always work (try to keep track of where people are standing in almost any big villain confrontation), but at least here there's a sense that Gunn is throwing in everything on his way out the door. You'll never doubt this one's coming from the heart - 20% of the time at least.
- Anthony Morris
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