Finally: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ Is the Best Marvel Movie in Years

After a 10-year partnership with the studio, James Gunn has left Marvel for its rival DC Studios, where Warner Bros has placed him in charge alongside co-chairman and co-CEO Peter Safran. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (in theaters May 5) is thus a swan song of sorts, marking the writer/director’s third and final MCU feature about the eccentric team of intergalactic do-gooders.

It comes at a perilous moment for the entertainment behemoth, courtesy of a string of creative and box-office letdowns (most recently, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) that have suggested that its cultural pull is waning. A summer-season kick-off that’s also being counted on to continue its predecessors’ success and, in the process, correct its company’s wayward course, Gunn’s latest is a last hurrah with a lot riding on it.

The result, thankfully, is an amusing, exciting and surprisingly moving farewell.

Capturing a good bit of the goofy magic of the first Guardians of the Galaxy (if not quite the gonzo insanity of his DC efforts The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker), Vol. 3 is a definitive conclusion to this era of the series.

As such, it packs in as much mayhem, jokiness, callbacks, and sappiness as its 150-minute runtime will allow—which isn’t always the same as all that should have been allowed. Still, the filmmaker’s deep and abiding affection for these characters is as sincere as it is infectious, and his ability to lace their combative chemistry with mushy mounds of heart does much to justify any bloat. A first-rate rebound from the relatively underwhelming Vol. 2, it’s a bursting-at-the-seams adventure that, minor missteps aside, reminds viewers why this ragtag crew remains one of the MCU’s highlights.

[Minor spoilers follow]

Vol. 3 opens in Knowhere, the Guardians’ floating-head-city headquarters, with Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) chugging booze to drown his sorrow over the loss of Gamora (Zoe Saldana), who died in Avengers: Infinity War and was then replaced in this timeline by Gamora’s prior self, who doesn’t remember her love affair with Peter.

That winds up being the least of the gang’s problems, since their home is soon rocked by a blistering attack from Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a golden-skinned superbeing who’s intent on capturing wiseass raccoon Rocket (Bradley Cooper) for his creator/master, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). Warlock’s assault doesn’t go according to plan, but it does leave Rocket mortally wounded and his comrades at once shaken and desperate to find a means of saving their friend.

The Guardians’ ensuing mission leads them straight to the High Evolutionary, who in flashbacks is identified as Rocket’s father, a sci-fi Dr. Moreau with a rampant God complex who experiments on organic creatures as a way of creating flawless life—and, with it, a utopian society. Rocket’s backstory is the narrative and emotional crux of Vol. 3, which reveals that Rocket was an experiment gone right, so uniquely intellectual and inventive that he inspired furious jealousy and disgust in his architect, a haughty being who cares only for faultless ideals. This, consequently, resulted in betrayal and calamity, not only with regards to Rocket but also his beloved misfit-animal pals, who shared his dream of one day making it to paradise.

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The imperfect are perfect in the eyes of Vol. 3, whose tale is a slam-bang celebration of outcasts and the caring communities they form. The Guardians are a motley bunch who share a close-knit bond that, at this point, is so well-developed that Gunn has an easy time pairing them off and pinging them off each other. That’s true for dim-bulb Drax (Dave Bautista) and earnest Mantis’s (Pom Klementieff) sibling-y rapport, Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Drax’s antagonism, or Kraglin (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo the Spacedog’s (Maria Bakalova) petulant hostility.

No matter the character configurations of a given scene, the film benefits immensely from its protagonists’ natural and sharp-tongued back-and-forths, not to mention their genuine fondness for one another, which in this instance is the bedrock foundation for the surrounding silliness, and is routinely expressed in ways that never unduly tip into mawkishness.

Gunn enlivens his muddy Marvel-standard visuals with occasional eruptions of color, and he overstuffs his action with slimy squid-like monsters (a guiding fixation) as well as a handful of secondary characters that include Warlock’s mother Ayesha (a funny if underutilized Elizabeth Debicki), Gamora’s new Ravager boss Stakar (a cameoing Sylvester Stallone), and Master Karja (Nathan Fillion), a security bigwig on an organic space station who hilariously commiserates with Peter over having to put up with one squadmate who’s a few cards shy of a full deck.

There are massive set pieces that culminate with a grand everyone-working-together hallway slaughter, and needless complications that distend the material. You take the good with the less good when it comes to Vol. 3, and fortunately, there’s considerably more of the former than the latter, as the director goes for the jugular with wacko glee, staging everything as a sentimental opera of the absurd.

From Peter’s cocky buffoonery to Drax’s excitable, simple-minded brutality to Groot’s (Vin Diesel) one-phrase-fits-all cheeriness, the film doesn’t mess with what works; other than adding a few profanities and some—gasp!—new dialogue for its conversationally repetitive hero, its chief deviation from formula is ramping up the melodrama.

Dancing to its own idiosyncratic beat (via a soundtrack filled with songs from Radiohead, Heart, The Flaming Lips and Beastie Boys), Vol. 3 pulls at the heartstrings in a manner dissimilar to most prior Marvel ventures. While it’s not always graceful in that regard, the sheer likability of its main players carries the day. A paean to clan solidarity—and the sacrifices it sometimes demands—it has compassion to spare.

No matter how unique Gunn makes things, Vol. 3 must hew to convention by utilizing post-credit scenes to set up an inevitable future. Nonetheless, what’s refreshing about this wild and wooly romp is that it generally feels untethered to the larger franchise, eschewing the winks, nods, and references that so many Marvel movies now make in order to keep the serialized juggernaut going.

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Go it mostly will, even in the aftermath of this closing installment. Yet with his exuberant and effusive threequel, Gunn has completed a trilogy that stands alone as the only MCU work that boasts the inimitable stamp of its artistic maker.

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