2017, Movies

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017, James Gunn)

I don’t know what kind of ill-humour causes me to not love these movies as much as the next guy, but I was pretty damn underwhelmed by the (possibly over-hyped) first Guardians of the Galaxy and really had no plans to watch this one, unless I was bored one day looking through Netflix (which is how I watch all Marvel movies, at this point). But I found myself on a plane, without personal TVs, bound to watch it. So I did.

I understand it’s just me, but this series isn’t very funny. I mean, it’s occasionally funny but the idea that these films are the comic alternative to the serious main Marvel films strikes me as absurd. The main Marvel films have jokes in them! Sometimes those jokes work better than in the Guardians films. Anyway…

I would say that this one is as mildly amusing as the first but with the stakes upped a little bit (as is the case with all Marvel sequels) and a reasonably good turn from the bad guy (who I won’t reveal because: spoilers). I don’t particularly care about these characters – yes, even groot (shock! horror! what kind of monster are you, Riley?!?!) – and I find the attempt at balancing mild comedy with lots and lots of sentiment about your family being the people you meet in your life who you care about to be clunky and distracting. I would prefer if this film committed to the comedy fully, like Deadpool, and dropped the sentiment for most (preferably all!) of the movie. The balancing act doesn’t work for me; not funny enough and too damn sentimental for a movie with as many deaths as this one has. (And, seriously, there is a lot of death in this film, particularly in one scene where 50-100 people die. Oh, they’re comic book villains, so it doesn’t matter? Oh, okay.)

I am left thinking “meh” and wondering what it is that everyone else sees in the series. The movie is not bad; it’s well made, it has reasonably good performances (with one pretty great one) and the special effects are very, very good. But I just don’t care, as with pretty much every Marvel movie lately, and I wasn’t entertained enough to overcome my apathy towards yet more superheroes.

6/10

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