Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2: Still Messing With Expectations

James Gunn's 2014 masterpiece Guardians of the Galaxy has me conflicted for numerous reasons. On one hand, its arguably the best Marvel movie made during the current cinematic cycle, has a perfect cast with spot-on humor and chemistry and action sequences that remain some of the best you will see on the market today. On the other, Gunn is something of the directorial equivalent of an internet troll and I could never quite shake the thought that the man might just be arrogantly teasing us with his talent by making the most un-Marvel movie ever (a nothing post-credit scene, an air of self-loathing on top of all the humor). If I were to go by Volume 2, I might as well just remain conflicted.

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 is awesome. The characters are still perfect, the humor is still spot-on, there's actually some depth to the side characters for a change and Drax (Dave Bautista) is still the weird, out-of-touch psychopath that we all know and love from the first movie. Throw in a surprising narrative turn that gives both Nebula (Karen Gillan) and Yondu (Michael Rooker) much needed back stories with out-of-left-field depth they were sorely lacking in the original and you have a movie that fixes the only niggling things I could manage to find from its original. They took a practically perfect movie and made a sequel seemingly to remove the hard-to-find blemishes. That's insane in a good way.

As for bad, as with most Marvel sequels, there's just not a lot of wonder to go around this time and there's really nothing even the likes of Gunn can actually do to fix such a problem. While it's easy to love these characters, we already know them and their motivations, making them familiar and, to a lesser extent, kind of boring. Throwing in a misplaced alien psychic with Mantis (Pom Klementieff) as the new character doesn't help when you realize she only seems to be there for strict plot progression purposes. This was a movie that somehow made Sylvester Stallone into a deep and relatable character yet somehow couldn't make the newest member of the Guardians anything but a plot point? Come on, man!

As for watching it, yeah, go do that. It's still a fun time with all the humor you could either want or stand and, while the whole main plot does tend to get a little out of hand near the end, you'd still be hard-pressed to find anything to truly dislike out of the whole experience. If anything, this is a nice farewell for James Gunn from the franchise and his last, big obscene gesture to us all for expecting him to play by the book. Plus, they made freaking Yondu (the guy who openly talks about eating Peter) a sympathetic character! Talent!

James Gunn (Slither) continues to make movies seemingly as practical jokes on audiences with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, a fun, mostly entertaining, sci-fi epic-like movie that spends very little time trying to acquaint you with its lore and more time making fun of your expectations. While fleeing from another botched heist, the Guardians encounter weird, hippy alien Ego (Kurt Russell) who promptly drops a bomb on Peter (Chris Pratt): he's his father and he's also a freaking planet (it makes more sense when you watch it)! While everything seems good and he's finally at peace, Peter and his friends can't shake the feeling that something is seriously wrong with Ego. Along the way, Yondu will finally show just how honorable he can be and why he's so cynical in the first place, Nebula will form some kind of sisterly bond with Gamora (Zoe Saldana) while describing the unpleasant things she wants to do to Thanos (Josh Brolin) in later movies and 5 (FIVE) post-credit scenes will tease us with nothing except how stupid we are to be sitting in a movie theater waiting for the credits to end just for a few milliseconds of some future, unfinished movie (it openly mocks you for expecting anything more). Go watch it and feel kind of dumb for not realizing these things earlier.

My score: 8/10. I often say that April is the month Hollywood dumps their worst tripe as some kind of extended April Fools' joke. After seeing the line up of last month, I stand by that accusation.