3rd installment gives viewers sour, harsh definition of ‘fun’
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” says one character about another’s transgressions (attempted murder, in this case) in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” The line written by screenwriter James Gunn refers obliquely, or at least coincidentally, to his firing off the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise after Disney took a look at his jokes about rape and pedophila on Twitter. Then they gave him a second chance. And here we are.
It’s the usual pale male instance of who gets the do-overs in Hollywood and who doesn’t. If you stretch for a more charitable reading, it’s an indication of some theoretically reassuring but, in this case, fruitless creative latitude afforded a highly skilled, highly uneven wiseacre.
To wit, or in this case, witless: The MCU’s gunkiest, most grotesque and most aggravating product to date comes from the writer-director who delivered a zippy first “Guardians” entry, followed by a wobbly but diverting yo-yo of a middle installment.
I’m in full agreement with my 13-year-old MCU devotee stepson who, on the long ride home after the “Guardians 3” screening, called the movie “a lot of animal abuse, plus killing, and four hours of angry people yelling at each other.”
The movie’s 150 minutes trudge like 240, and Gunn spends many of those minutes dealing with flashbacks and present-day scenes of Dr. Moreau “Island of Lost Souls” cross-species experimentation in what feels like a particularly vicious animal shelter. If a superhero movie’s quality could be quantified by close-ups of bleeding, shivering, terrified digital-but-real-looking creatures, with some shot point-blank for maximum traumatization of the audience, “Guardians 3” would sail straight past the Oscars to the Nobel committee.
The movie’s a blur of detours. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and the rest of the Guardians must rescue Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) from the Dr. Moreau ripoff, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). The antagonist schemes to perfect the utopian nightmare he has begun constructing on Counter-Earth, which is “Don’t Worry Darling” suburbia populated by genetic mutants.
There’s more, notably a wary reunion of Quill and the memory-wiped reborn version of his girlfriend, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), and a trip to the Orgosphere, a pimply-looking joint. There, and on an already broken-down CounterEarth, Gunn favors touches of “A Clockwork Orange” and, more innocently, 1966’s “Fantastic Voyage,” if “Fantastic Voyage” set course for a pus-flecked version of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
I’ve enjoyed much of Gunn’s work, especially the first “Guardians.”
At his most intuitive, he cracks the elusive code of violence mixed with macabre humor. Here, it’s just sourness and chaos. The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in “Guardians 3” may be sincere, but the pacing of the film never finds the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or another round of wanton slaughter. Worst MCU film ever? I know a 13-year-old target audience member who thinks so.
PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, strong language, suggestive/drug references and thematic elements) 2:30 In theaters