Rating in Stars: *** (out of ****)
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, the voices of Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel
Director: James Gunn
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for some language)
Running Time: 2:01
Release Date: 08/01/14
It might seem an odd place on which to start a positive review of, well, any movie, as well as it might run the risk of flying in the face of the usual logic, but Guardians of the Galaxy tries to be three things at once and only really works as one of them. Bear with me here, though, reader, because the one thing it does succeed at being is so significant that it dwarfs the other, less successful attempts. Because the screenplay by Nicole Perlman and director James Gunn approaches the origin story of yet another team of scrappy, fundamentally different superheroes as a comedy of five egos battling each other’s opposing philosophies.
It’s funny stuff in a smarmy and sarcastic way that might be its undoing if not for the fact that the actors in the roles of our heroes are so adept at playing the comedy mostly straight. The exception to that might be Chris Pratt as Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord, the de facto leader of the group that forms by accident and through reluctance on each member’s part. He was stolen from Earth mere minutes after his mother’s death and, even now, is stuck in the mode of the 1980s, listening to a Walkman radio as a way by which to remember her. Zoe Saldana is Gamora, a ruthless assassin and one of the two daughters of the guy who is positioned as the Big Bad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Dave Bautista is Drax, an assassin himself who has no capacity to understand metaphor (Things don’t go over his head, he explains, because his reflexes are simply too good).
There are also Bradley Cooper voicing Rocket, a raccoon and former laboratory experiment whose personality defect is that he wants to cause destruction wherever he goes, and Vin Diesel as the voice of Groot, a sentient tree and Rocket’s hired bodyguard whose vocabulary is limited to five words (one of which is his name). The film smartly downplays these characters’ positive attributes to such a degree that they only occasionally eke through: Peter is brave but self-congratulatory in his courage, Gamora always has the hardened exterior of the girl who was taken from the family her father killed so that he could enslave her, Drax is determined to face the man who killed his own family to a degree that places everyone else at risk, Rocket will never understand why he was made to cause destruction but definitely wants to wreak that havoc, and Groot is, well, Groot.
The film’s attempts at something more earnest than it is feel as much like half-measures as its attempts to work as yet another stepping stone for the MCU, which pop up when the film must ultimately position them against a generic threat. He arrives in the form of Ronan the Accuser (an unrecognizable Lee Pace), who wants to control the universe with some sort of Infinity Stone that does something or other. It’s a MacGuffin, basically. He joins forces with Nebula (Karen Gillan), Gamora’s sister, while the heroes call upon a couple of officials (played by Glenn Close and John C. Reilly in throwaway appearances) from the planet that Ronan and Nebula hope to destroy. The conflict resolves itself in about as convoluted a way as a confusing MacGuffin can provide.
That, then, speaks indirectly to the film’s decision to also attempt to work as an action movie, and Gunn is mostly imprecise in doing so. The sequences of escapes and combat are competently staged and shot by Ben Davis but largely unspectacular (The finale is a whirl of random motion). Even so, there’s the dominating positive force of the primary cast of characters, each of whom is such a stand-out original that everything surrounding them is rendered null by their presence. Guardians of the Galaxy is a very funny movie in its best moments, and that is because of pure, unflappable conviction exactly where it counts.
Podcasting Them Softly 