While this post-credits scene ostensibly points toward a future for the franchise (including, it pains me to say, one particular inflection that reminded me all too much of the dismal Thor: Love and Thunder), it is also trying desperately to serve as an evocative coda to a trilogy that hasn’t held together as well as its finale would like to pretend. Writer/director James Gunn is juggling too much, straining like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man to hold it all together, and while the film is competently told and engaging enough, it is overlong and baggy, and it serves more as a love letter to itself than anything else.
Vol. 3 finds Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) wounded in a battle with Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), leading to the revelation, finally, of the horrific circumstances that created Rocket. Peter Quill, the Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), and his ersatz band of Guardians team up with the Ravager Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) to break into the vaults of the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) in search of Rocket’s salvation.
If I’m daydreaming or almost falling asleep, there’s something very wrong with the movie. And while I should have been trying harder to separate the movie from off-screen drama, vast swaths of this bloated movie failed to hold my attention. (It wasn’t, however, as dire as Black Widow, the only Marvel movie where I’m not convinced I didn’t nod off.) And so it was that I found myself wondering how many moviegoers had seen last November’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which already introduced the concept of the Guardians defending Knowhere alongside the revelation that Peter Quill and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) were half-siblings. I wondered if we were still in trilogy territory, and then I remembered that the Guardians trilogy had a significant detour through Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which looms quite large over Vol. 3.
Here, Gunn has to accommodate the time-travel shenanigans that killed off Gamora but restored her from a decade-old past, and Gunn never quite figures out how to fit Gamora back into the franchise. Moreover, the film takes time to air Gunn’s own grievances about the way “his” characters were handled by the Russo Brothers in the third and fourth Avengers films (a complaint no one else shares); in one of my least favorite superhero movie tropes, Star-Lord has a long monologue about the unfortunate and nonsensical circumstances that have led to his current state of affairs. It’s a scene that is meant to play for laughs, but the joke is on the source material and on the fans for taking any of this seriously; in short, it’s another iteration of Gunn’s “comics are for bozos” mentality, and of his bizarre insistence that only he understands these characters. (See also his recent claims that Star-Lord would never have lost his temper in the fight against Thanos.)
Indeed, throughout the film, Gunn is trying to play the hits, his hits, as in the Redbone sequence, but all of it feels simply like thumbing through a scrapbook – which the end credits actually bear out, showing still photos to remind us of the foregoing entries in the franchise. But each echo misses what made the originals special. The first Guardians film was a breath of fresh air in a genre that was beginning to take itself too seriously, and it was a welcome treat to see on-screen interpretations of characters that even comics fans thought too ludicrous for primetime. Even the second film, which hasn’t aged well in my estimations, overly reliant on emotional insincerity and crude humor, still had that Marvel heart when it came to the idea of family. Never mind the iconic soundtrack of the films, mashing up unlikely oldies with shots of spaceships and laser blasts; here, however, none of the songs is really very memorable, and the gag about swapping a Walkman for a Zune seems to have yielded only a paucity of good tunes. (Even the Guardians fanfare gets short shrift in this one.) Here, however, Vol. 3 is an ending that doesn’t have the heart to end, striking a false chord in the final twenty minutes, which consist of (as Neil Gaiman would put it) people standing around saying good-bye to each other.
In the middle of it all, though, is a very compelling performance by Chukwudi Iwuji as one of Marvel’s better villains of late. His High Evolutionary is a far cry from the cosmic source material, but Iwuji’s version is fantastic, entirely unsympathetic and intrinsically evil without needing to twirl a mustache. As great as he is, though, there’s a beat where Star-Lord cuts short his supervillain soliloquy with snarky remarks about why villain monologues don’t work and whether the High Evolutionary’s mother loved him enough. Iwuji barrels on, almost as if he’s sick of these jokes too, and one almost wishes that this spine of the film had been its own Rocket Raccoon feature – inspired by, or perhaps plagiarized from, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s We3 comics about animal experimentation. (Floor the Rabbit is, at least, plundered wholesale from We3’s Pirate.) In fact, Iwuji’s performance is so engaging that one wonders if he shouldn’t replace the beleaguered Jonathan Majors and retroactively enroll the High Evolutionary as one more ageless Kang.
Look, I’m no fan of James Gunn, but I went into this thing with an open mind. I did, after all, love the first one! Vol. 3 is not, thank God, the nightmarish brand of misanthropy we saw in The Suicide Squad – a film that I’m still convinced would like nothing more than to shove me into a locker – and it’s at least effective on an emotionally manipulative level. The action scenes aren’t anything special, and the script is working overtime to resolve too many concurrent plots. But it lacks sufficient grounds for me to be able to say it’s a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it ought to be, nor as good as it hopes, striking an indelicate balance between ridiculing its characters for having emotions and then expecting us to play along when those same emotions are played sincerely.
Vol. 3 is, in short, attempting to eat its cake and have it too, but it’s a cake with a hollow center that tries to convince us that it’s a better, earlier cake. Worse, this particular cake smacks of self-congratulation, yet at the end of the day, I’ve eaten 32 slices (plus whatever the television shows are in this analogy), and I’ve come too far to quit just yet.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements.” Written and directed by James Gunn. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldaña, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Chukwudi Iwuji, and Will Poulter.
