Review: In 'Guardians 3,' ultra-weird superhero fun doesn't have to be Rocket science

Let’s run the numbers: “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is the third movie in a trilogy (duh), the second Marvel movie to be released this year (yawn), the 32nd movie in the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe (sigh) and, as hyper-aware fans doubtless already know, the first of those 32 MCU movies to feature an uncensored F-bomb (about time). I’m not sure the last was worth the wait, though by this point in the series — after some 64-plus hours’ worth of bombastic explosions, murky action, crisscrossing timelines, intergalactic skirmishes, butt-hurt baddies, tiresome daddy issues, genocidal cataclysms, box office conquests, military propaganda and strenuously breezy wisecracks — a single PG-13-compliant four-letter expletive is certainly well-earned.

And hilariously well deployed, I must say. I won’t spoil the context — I couldn’t anyway, since the scene is already online — except to note that it feels like a nicely profane parting shot for the writer-director James Gunn, resident mischief maker among superhero auteurs, as he makes his way out of Disney/MCU headquarters. (Gunn, who also wrote and directed the first two “Guardians” movies, is now creative mastermind over at the rival DC Studios.) More to the point, the F-bomb lands in the middle of an enjoyably eccentric, insouciantly funny and often beautiful-looking jumble of an entertainment that plays — at least when it isn’t let down by a wobbly seriocomic tone and some excessive narrative multitasking — like a sincerely moving farewell to some of the more likable rogues and motley misfits in the Marvel cosmos.

They’re pretty much all back, if not quite better than ever. There’s Peter Quill, a.k.a. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), the Guardians’ goofily intrepid, ’70s rock-loving captain, who’s been drinking himself into a stupor ever since losing his bad-ass beloved, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña). Gamora isn’t dead; she’s just testy and amnesia-stricken, with no memory of her past adventures with Peter or his antennae-sporting empath sister, Mantis (Pom Klementieff), or the lovably dimwitted Drax (Dave Bautista), or the sharp-clawed, sharper-tongued Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Gamora can no longer even understand Groot, the gnarly tree-man with the expressive three-word language and the voice of Vin Diesel; even her heated longtime rivalry with her perpetually snarling sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan), seems to have gone cold.

I confess to experiencing my own Gamora-esque bouts of memory loss when it comes to recalling ancient or recent Marvel lore, and so struggled to place Kraglin Obfonteri (Sean Gunn, the director’s brother), a telekinetic dude with a highly communicative space pooch (voiced by Maria Bakalova). I did remember the imperiously gold-plated Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), since it’s hard to forget a character who swans into every scene looking like an Oscar statuette fresh out of the tanning bed. One important and annoying newcomer is Ayesha’s son, Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a callow fighter who enters the movie with a violent whoosh, launching an ambush on the Guardians that ends with Rocket unconscious and gravely wounded.

Rocket proves troublingly resistant to medical treatment, sending his friends on a valiant, sometimes bumbling journey for answers and antidotes. And so they journey far and wide, visiting distant planets and breaking into top-secret filing cabinets, bragging and bickering at every turn. The comic patter is familiar but effective, much of it swirling around Peter’s efforts to charm his way past Gamora’s hostile eye rolls. Along the way, Gunn ushers us into uncharted new realms of wackadoo production design (by Beth Mickle) and outlandish costumes (by Judianna Makovsky), reminding us that he’s never been shy about letting his stylistic freak flag fly. Why are those security guards wearing giant pan dulce? Why not?

Meanwhile, Rocket spends his coma reliving his own harrowing origin story in flashback — a development that gutsily repositions this reliable second banana as the hero of the story and perhaps of this mini-franchise as a whole. (He’s tellingly introduced first in a catch-up sequence set to Radiohead’s “Creep,” the first, longest and most effective of the movie’s signature needle drops.)

Rocket’s story also ushers in some unusually grave and, depending on your tolerance for CGI animal cruelty, potentially objectionable scenes of a grievously abused young raccoon, stuck in a cage with three other friendly, furry captives who have been and will be subjected to all manner of mistreatment. Their tormenter is a uniquely sadistic villain (played by Chukwudi Iwuji) who calls himself the High Evolutionary but is basically a veterinarian Dr. Mengele. He plans to populate a new planet with a master race of genetically engineered human-critter combos, purging as many innocent, imperfect prototypes along the way as he needs to.

At one point, Peter snarlingly dismisses the High Evolutionary as just another “impotent wack job whose mother didn’t love him trying to rationalize why he’s conquering the universe.” It’s a pretty good line, and if it exemplifies an unfortunate MCU tendency of late (let’s recycle clichés by cloaking them in self-awareness), it also firmly ensconces Raccoon alongside Peter, Gamora and Nebula, all mutts and castoffs who’ve suffered at the hands of malevolent dads and dad figures and their damnable Old Testament God complexes. The idea is driven home by a late-breaking sequence that plays like a sci-fi Noah’s Ark and, with a sense of ethical purpose that smacks of self-critique, suggests that the “Guardians” franchise, for all its intergalactic diversity, has too often focused on what one character calls “the higher life forms,” to the detriment of its animal constituents.

That’s all well and good, even if Gunn’s attempts at sincerity don’t always hit the mark. The well-meaning yet punitive heavy-handedness of the animal-abuse sequences seldom sits easily with the glibly violent punchlines that the director indulges elsewhere, including a bizarrely sour scene in which a side character is fried to a crisp while his poor four-legged (I think) companion looks on, whimpering in horror. That flair for impish, pranksterish humor has of course been a Gunn career specialty since he began writing Troma Entertainment cheapies in the ’90s, and it certainly played a role in his landing the “Guardians of the Galaxy” gig to begin with.

Gunn managed the flow of action, comedy, music, character setup and forward momentum more or less seamlessly in the first “Guardians,” and to serviceable if diminished effect in “Vol. 2.” He was famously fired from “Vol. 3” for a spell, and I can’t help but wonder if that short-lived brush with career death spurred him to pull out most of the stops here and emerge with by far the messiest, unruliest and most interesting “Guardians” movie of the three. It’s the one that feels most weirdly and defiantly its own thing, the one least straitjacketed by Marvel conventions. Which is not to say it’s as fully unhinged or unbound as it should be; entertaining as it is, the movie isn't as fully realized as Gunn’s recent “The Suicide Squad,” a proudly R-rated, heavily Troma-influenced entertainment that wore its comic-book nihilism on its sleeve.

“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” has its own appreciable mean streak, to be sure, but that streak is still largely subordinated to sentimental franchise-finale demands. That may be a compromise, but it’s not a failure. For all the visual weirdness and misfit irreverence he pumped into these stories, Gunn’s obvious love for these characters has been the trilogy's consistent and undeniable saving grace. And he notably doesn’t sell out that love as he brings those characters all to a conclusion, or at least a mid-franchise inflection point, that carries an ache of bittersweet feeling.

End-credits teasers aside, the story here feels appreciably and even radically self-enclosed, and if its sense of finality turns out to be an illusion, it feels real and moving enough in the moment. There’s also the not-unignorable fact that after a couple of Marvel duds (“Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”), it’s a pleasure to see a superhero movie that actually puts a priority on aesthetics, that floods the screen with inventive, well-lighted images and, in one gleefully orchestrated single-take sequence, reminds us how more of the action in these movies should be: nasty, Grootish and short.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.