Cinemavenger
The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
People are fairly worthless at most things, but they're fucking experts at convincing themselves that their worst ideas are absolute genius. Just ask the 300-pound woman making her fifth trip to the buffet at the all-you-can-eat. Or the guy rawdogging his crazy ex after drunk dialing her at 3AM. Or Iger and the rest of the Disney execs convincing themselves that they can keep people interested in Marvel after all the A-List characters are dead or otherwise gone.
It's one thing to hook a generation of moviegoers on the likes of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor. Even if you've never read a comic book, you've heard of those characters. Disney/Marvel should've rode those horses into the paved-with-gold ground, but instead it looks like they've decided that that better plan is to move on to the "next generation" of younger characters, and that's where they done fucked up. They've confused casual audiences with die hard comic book fans, and it's gonna bite them in their foie gras-filled asses.
The success of the first Guardians of the Galaxy is definitely to blame. "If people will flock to see these D-List superheroes, they'll give us their green for just about anything," Marvel cackled. The sequel making big bank was just another nail in the coffin. "Why pay Robert Downey, Jr. money when we can get some unknown assholes for next to nothing?!"
By the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, it's clear that even D-Listers will be too much to hope for in the ever expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Who needs Chris Pratt's Star-Lord, Zoe Saldana's Gamora, and Karen Gillan's Nebula when you've got James Gunn's brother playing a random space pirate, the chick from the Borat sequel voicing a cosmonaut dog, and a young girl improbably named Kai Zen as a character that only the hardest of hardcore nerds have ever even heard of.
Guardians Vol. 3 feels like a victory lap/long goodbye from its first scene. It's less a movie than a teary farewell at a train station. The "save Rocket" plot is just an excuse for endless flashbacks and strained sentimentality. The flick gets points for a fun Nathan "Firefly" Fillion cameo and for dropping the first MCU f-bomb (as lazy and uninspired as it is), but it loses all of them for having more endings than the third Lord of the Rings.
June 9, 2023