With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, writer-director James Gunn has achieved something, in my eyes, that I don't think has ever happened before: he's completed an entire trilogy of comic book movies where none of the three entries have been a disappointment. Probably the closest we've come before now has been the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, but I think there's plenty of room to think that The Dark Knight Rises was pretty good (as I do), while also thinking that it is nevertheless a disappointment (as I also do). But with the Guardians films, even if one agrees with me that they steadily decrease in quality from one to the next, they're all of a piece with each other: if you like the 2014 Guardians of the Galaxy, I think you will probably also like the 2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, and you you liked that second film, I can think of very little reason you would not like this film.

Given the propensity of superhero and comic book series to break apart when it comes time to stick the landing, that's already an admirable achievement in its own right, but the reason I'm really bringing it up is because it speaks to the cozy little niche Gunn has carved out with these movies. In the heart of one of the most carefully micro-managed, corporatised franchises in contemporary media, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Gunn and company (and Vol. 3 mounts the argument very forcefully that these are happy little group efforts, not grand auteur statements) have managed to make three consecutive films that feel earnestly personal. This is the overwhelming energy that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 puts off: that a bunch of folks who love working with each other have huddled up to make something that they all feel very good about, and thus say good-bye to a very pleasant and rewarding working environment. Indeed, it almost certainly has too much of this energy: on of the biggest problems with the film is that it's spending its 150 minutes finding every possible loose end to tie up in a nice bow and give it a kiss and a pat on the head, even loose ends that I cannot imagine any viewer actually caring about. E.g. it devotes an entire ongoing subplot to the emotional conflict between The One Space-Pirate Guy Played By James Gunn's Brother (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo the Talking Space-Dog (Maria Bakalova), who basically hasn't even been in one of these before (she was an Easter egg in the first two, before being properly introduced in the direct-to-Disney+ 2022 Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special), one whose ending point is self-evident from the exact second that it's introduced. The weird thing is that this sort even works; the scenes of those two characters have a nice cadence, Bakalova's funny in them, and the inordinately predictable conclusion ends up feeling more "classical" than "trite". I would still have cut it all out, but then I am not part of this big warm extended family, and the one space-pirate guy and the dog both are.

The point being, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a bit soppy and a bit lumpy and generally disinterested in making any very hard choices, and in principle all of this annoys me, but in practice it's all counterbalanced by how much you can feel the filmmakers' love oozing out of this, overindulgent thought it might be. In this moment in time, as the early 2020s start to shade into the mid-2020s, big-budget popcorn spectacle that appears to have been made by humans with any sort of emotional connection to their material has become an extraordinary special and rare commodity, and whatever else is true of this movie, all the stuff inside of it is pretty obviously there because Gunn wants it to be there, and believes in it, and cares about it (or at least he used to: the film introduces the cosmic superhuman Adam Warlock, as played by Will Poulter, and it's very clear that it has no ideas for what to actually do with him, beyond "set him up for future movies". But we do know that Gunn wanted to play around with this character at one point, even if that point was prior to writing the first draft of this screenplay). It feels like a movie that was made, not a movie that was calculated into being by committee, and like many such movies, I think if you started trying to pull out the bits that are baggy and redundant, you would rip out some of the heart and soul along with them.

Even the film's central conflict reflects this kind of warm fuzziness : in what I believe to be objectively the lowest-stakes scenario ever concocted for an MCU film, the conflict basically consists of "our friend is sick, and we have to infiltrate the bad guy's lair to find a way to heal him. Eventually, those stakes broaden, sure; it's a big-budget movie, it needs to have enormous explosions and such, and lots of life or death peril. The bad guy in question, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, making a pretty tasty ham sandwich despite only having low-quality ingredients in the script), is something of a megalomaniacal space-eugenicist, who creates entire societies in the hopes of making them pure utopias, and then destroying his creations when they fail to live up to his standards, so there's a whole "prevent the slaughterer of millions from being able to slaughter millions more" angle, but it never feels like that's why the film is going forward; it's incidental to the much more central question of whether or not the Guardians - goofy human Peter "Star-Lord" Quill (Chris Pratt), irritable cyborg Nebula (Karen Gillan), hyper-literal muscle Drax (Dave Bautista), empathic weirdo Mantis (Pom Klementieff), kindly tree-man Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel) - will be able to find a way to save their dear sentient space-racoon friend Rocket (voiced Bradley Cooper), one of the High Evolutionary's most successful early experiments, we now find out. The film puff up is length and builds out its structure through a series of flashbacks to Rocket's early life as a caged lab animal, making friends with other sweet-tempered monstrosities, and this is where Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 attempts to do virtually all of its emotionally heavy-lifting: I will first say that I think it gets there (the film gets an extraordinary amount of tear-jerking sentiment out of having a certain character say the word "racoon" in a certain context near the end), and I will then say that I think it is a shameless cheat in getting there, since it's mostly doing so by having cute animals - a bunny, an otter, and a walrus, all in slightly cartoony CGI that makes them unreasonably expressive - talk in sweet voices and suffer. At the same time, there's nothing in the film that's more vintage Gunn than the hideous Dr. Moreau-esque cyborg monstrosities that animals have been turned into, morbid black jokes that prove you can do viscerally unsettling body horror with non-human animals. So there's a nice mix of the saccharine and the gleefully bitter, at least.

Anyway, the story itself is fine, without being particularly clean or propulsive; everything good about the film is where it's doodling on the margins. As has been true of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies before this, many of its pleasures come from watching side characters muck about on the rough edges, leisurely enjoying the best overall ensemble in the MCU riff around banter that's quippy without feeling like stale Joss Whedon leftover. There's an extensive quantity of movie that I don't think even rises to the level of "subplot", though it takes up enough screentime that I don't know what else to call it, that basically just consists of watching Bautista and Klementieff needle each other like an old vaudeville team, pleasantly deflating the grandeur of the elaborate sci-fi shenanigans around them by turning it into the background for cheerily dopey jokes. As has also been true of the movies before this, Vol. 3 is elaborately over-designed, with production designer Beth Mickle (who is, I think, the secret but very unmistakable MVP of this outing) creating big, gaudy spaces that evoke the spectacular tackiness of pulp sci-fi, executed with an unfathomable quantity of money to make them look more lavishly physical than any pulp author could have ever imagined. The film devotes an extensive layover to a heist sequence in an organic space station with security guards dressed in big puffy uniforms that make them look like cancer cells, and it has a sort of oozy gross-out vibe without the actual ooze; there's a distinct "foam rubber" aura to it all, like the goal was to imagine what classic Doctor Who might look like if they could increase the budget literal 10,000 times but it's still a BBC production from the 1970s. I was never going to dislike the film after that layover; it's pretty long and only a little bit productive, but it's also one of the most honest parts of the whole movie, where Gunn and company extend their love to cheesey low-brow sci-fi epics from generations past, and revel in the fact that, once you scrape of the Disney prestige of it all, that's basically what they're making.

Some of the doodling, to be fair, doesn't work. After the first two films had some of the best music supervision in modern popcorn cinema, Vol. 3 completely drops the ball with a largely pointless and arbitrary soundtrack, abandoning the chronological curation that has previously marked these movies for a big random grab-bag of anything and everything from a 40-year window, the less creative or surprising the better (the film opens with a long sequence set to the acoustic version of Radiohead's "Creep", as the cheapest possible shortcut to "everybody is sad and mopey". Also, this is not merely the second wide-release film of 2023 to use the Beastie Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn", it is the second mega-budget tentpole starring Chris Pratt in the lead role to do so). There's a subplot in which Quill has to come to terms with the fact that the person named Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) he now works alongside is not in any sense the Gamora he fell in love with years ago and who has since died, and it's not that it's bad-bad, but you get the absolutely unmistakable sense that Gunn and Pratt, in particular, are extraordinarily furious about how Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame handled these characters in general and Gamora specifically: Pratt gets a motormouthed monologue summarising the first of those two films that I can't interpret any other way than Gunn publicly accusing the Russo brothers of ruining his trilogy. And so there's this very sullen going-through-the-motions aspect to the whole thing, with basically every one of Saldaña's scenes having a tonally flat quality that makes it pretty clear that the movie is doing this because it has to, but it doesn't want to, not one little bit.

So, you know, some things here don't play. It's the weakest Guardians film, when all is said and done. Just not weak enough to spoil the fun of watching this creative team wrap up their trilogy, mostly on their terms. It's a human-scaled film, made with a distinctly human messiness, and I can think of better things than that, but it still feels pretty important to know that there's still somebody who thinks that this is the way films should be made.

Other MCU reviews (Phase 5)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Reed, 2023)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Gunn, 2023)


Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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