‘Guardians’ serves up lots of gooey euphoria
‘Latest’ yarn also feels less like a sequel
(8) GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2. Directed by: James Gunn. Starring: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Kurt Russell, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper (voice), Vin Diesel (voice), Michael Rooker. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
ARE Marvel Studios bound by the same child labour laws as everyone else? The reason I ask is that the production design team on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 appears to have been entirely composed of sugared-up three and four-years-olds going berserk.
Not that the first Guardians of the Galaxy film, a swashbuckling science-fiction offshoot from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was a paragon of Bressonian austerity to start with.
But the new one – and this is meant as a heartfelt compliment – looks like an explosion in a nursery school craft cupboard. Every scene comes caked in rainbows, glitter, gunge and bubble mixture: if there had been a cost-effective way to stick dried pasta shapes and pipe cleaners to every cinema screen showing the thing, director James Gunn would have probably reached for his glue spreader.
That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, which inches even further to the end of the limb the original Guardians film went out on in 2014.
Take note of the “Vol 2” in the title too: it feels less like a sequel than another yarn from the annals, as if you’d pulled a forgotten comic-book anthology from the shelf, blown the dust off and dived in.
The core crew returns, led by Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), essentially a buffer and be-dorked Han Solo – though the sentient tree Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel, has been pruned back to a big-eyed sapling, making the character all but indistinguishable from his own tie-in vinyl collectible figure.
There’s a splashy opening battle with a giant space-faring octopus, scored to Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr Blue Sky for no reason other than the fingersnapping snazz of it. (The soundtrack also features Fleetwood Mac, Glen Campbell and David Hasselhoff, plus a recurrent use of Brandy by Looking Glass.)
But the gears of the plot only begin to grind with the arrival of a benign and bearded mystic called Ego (Kurt Russell), who has big news for Peter about his earthbound origins.
In a 1980-set prologue, Russell becomes the third Marvel actor, after Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jnr, to undergo digital de-ageing.
Along with the lean, green, mean Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and pebbledashed galoot Drax (Dave Bautista), Peter travels to Ego’s home planet.
Meanwhile Groot, Rocket Raccoon (voiced, as before, by Bradley Cooper) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) are left to tangle with a space pirate horde led by a fuming orc lookalike called Taserface (Chris Sullivan).
This storyline initially seems unconnected to Peter’s adventure, and it effectively is – but it smoothes the way for the return of Yondu (Michael Rooker), a blue-skinned scoundrel from the original, whom Gunn grants a more nuanced and moving arc than you’d ever imagine could shine through all that cobalt face-paint.
This is why Gunn is so ideal for this series. As a protégé of Lloyd Kaufman, the notorious schlockauteur and founder of Troma Entertainment, he understands the imagination-sparking power of the lurid and freakish, even in a $200-million (R2.6-million) franchise-tied blockbuster.
In an early sequence in a neon-drenched nightlife district, his camera gawps at the multi-coloured denizens catching snowflakes on their tongues – a shot that sets the mood more effectively and sensually than any number of hectares of green- screened digiscapes. (Not that the film is short on those either).
That Vol 2 makes time for this kind of thing – not to mention a steady flow of winking gags and cameos – shows we are worlds apart, in every sense, from the severe and sprawling canvases of Doctor Strange and Captain America: Civil War.
Here the fate of the galaxy may hang in the balance but the stakes often couldn’t feel lower. Take the fleet of spacecraft commanded by Elizabeth Debicki’s gold-plated alien priestess, which hounds the Guardians throughout. Her pilots aren’t strapped in their cockpits in the heat of battle, but working them remotely from a multi-tiered videogame arcade.
Even in its most tempestuous action set-pieces, the film is only playing. – The Telegraph