GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: Leggo My Ego

Other Review in this Series.

Director: James Gunn
Writer: James Gunn
Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff, Kurt Russell, Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone, Sean Gunn, Chris Sullivan
Runtime: 136 mins.
2017

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has lower highs and higher lows than its predecessor. It fixes some of the more obvious problems of Guardians, like painful expository dialogue, a few ugly underlit sequences, and a plot shamelessly centered around feverish MacGuffin-chasing. Vol. 2 is more visually arresting all around, and its villain is tied intimately to our protagonist. On the other hand, Vol. 2 struggles with the law of diminishing returns. It is impossible to replicate the joy of discovering all these bizarre and instantly endearing characters, so writer/director Gunn is tasked with keeping said characters fresh and interesting. Much like Age of Ultron, which similarly has a lot of interesting stuff going on but feels overstuffed and undercooked, Vol. 2 cannot quite capture the woozy highs of the first film.

There is one exception to this. I'm referring to the opening sequence with Baby Groot dancing to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" while the obligatory opening action sequence happens out of focus in the background. This is Gunnian subversion at its finest, trading off an indulgent CGI-fest for an expression of pure joy. The sequence is well-staged in one long, fluid cut that follows Baby Groot through adorable piecemeal interactions with each of the main characters. The film never recaptures the elation of its opening minutes, but the prevalent sense of fun is what makes Vol. 2 far more watchable than much of its ilk.

The plot kicks off with the Guardians--specifically Rocket--stealing a bunch of important crystals from the egregiously golden people who hired them specifically to protect said crystals. Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki) is the leader of The Sovereign, a petty and self-important people who play games of life and death in arcade-like pods, and who very much want Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and company dead. Our heroes are saved from their drone horde by a mysterious personage who turns out to be none other than Peter's father, Ego the Living Planet (Kurt Russell). He is both a humanoid avatar and the planet upon which the avatar resides, and also apparently a floating brain. From there the film fractures into a plethora of plots and subplots for a second act that feels meandering but productive.

There are spoilers from here on out, because I am about to mention that the magnanimous Ego is not exactly as he seems. There is something wrong and foreboding about his planet, though we are only really clued into this when Gamora tells us so. It turns out Ego, true to his name, actually desires Peter's demigod powers to help him spread his identity over every planet in a grand scheme of meaning. We learn through a clumsy expository dump from Ego that kicks off the climactic battle.

Marvel has a well-documented villain problem. They have scads of compelling baddies to draw from, but they fail at making these villains as functional and striking as their heroic counterparts. Loki seems to be the only exception. The most functional villains (Killian, Zemo) haven't been particularly striking, and the most striking villains (Red Skull, Whiplash) haven't been particularly functional. Ego is certainly a step up from the wispy nothingness of Lee Pace's Ronan, but there is a lingering feeling of missed potential. Though I cannot be too upset about a literal planet with a face on it.

Ego works well thematically, which is crucial in a movie so packed with stories about family and trauma as this one. Everyone learns valuable lessons about letting go of the ego in order to embrace empathy. The intricacies of character relationships in Gunn's screenplay are impressive, if not as sharp and focused as they could be. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) explore their contentious relationship. Yondu (Michael Rooker) and Rocket (Bradley Cooper) find a tortured kinship, while Yondu battles with Ego as well as his own mutinous crew for the right to be Peter's father figure. Drax (Dave Bautista) and newcomer Mantis (Pom Klementieff) form a deep emotional bond. Even Kraglin (Sean Gunn) gets some solid character moments. As a showpiece for new and familiar characters bouncing off each other in new and familiar ways, Vol. 2 excels.

It just doesn't have quite the same pop as the original, which is hardly something to blame it for. It is a perfectly competent and sometimes quite enjoyable first sequel, which is no small feat in the Marvel canon (so far only the Captain America series has not crapped the bed in its second outing). And anyway, it's clear that no creator in the MCU is as head-over-heels in love with his characters as James Gunn, and even a far worse movie could have been watchable for that reason alone.

3 / 5  BLOBS

PS - I thought about ending the review there but I actually want to say a few words about the "diminishing returns" that I mentioned above. Sequels in general suffer from diminishing returns for all manner of reasons, obvious and otherwise. Disney has essentially formed a business model around sequels, so the onus is on them to combat that trend. In a lot of ways they've done a good job. Their casting has been impeccable, their iconography is infectious, and they've been getting increasingly experimental and weird with each entry (the microverse of Ant-Man, the architectural psychedelia of Dr. Strange, huge swathes of Vol. 2). Even so, they have maintained an unshakably conservative mindset about certain aspects of their game, namely the perpetual rehashing of the charismatic white guy taking the hero's journey to defeat a CGI sky portal.

Too often these films are textural above all else. The textures are glorious, but one has to dig to get to material of substance. As I alluded to above, the themes of Vol. 2 are coherent and compelling, but they are not immediate. They are told rather than dramatized.

Even this is understandable. In order to buoy the enormous mass of a fifteen-and-counting movie franchise, one must cater to a conservative status quo unless one wants to risk alienating a hefty chunk of the audience. Thus it is difficult to dramatize anything because drama requires change, and the MCU is dedicated in many ways to the illusion of change. This isn't entirely fair--the films have made some bold choices that have shaken the mythology, like the dismantling of SHIELD. But even these are almost immediately rolled back, with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury saving the day with a helicarrier in Age of Ultron regardless of the events of Winter Soldier. Or even more frustrating, the complete erasure of what could have been a legitimate tragedy: the paralysis of War Machine in Civil War, rolled back by some Tony tech in the very same film.

Which brings me to the death of Yondu. This is Vol. 2's big emotional gambit, the consequence of the events of the movie. Something about the pomp and circumstance around his funeral rubbed me the wrong way. The sequence is lengthy, ponderous. By the time we got to the fireworks I couldn't help but feel the movie was proud of itself for actually doing something consequential, just as Age of Ultron was proud of itself for killing Quicksilver, just as Avengers was proud of itself for killing Coulson. It's as if the franchise is waving its arms and making sure you know that drama can still happen in an iterative filmmaking model--but it is only willing to dispose of secondary characters to demonstrate this.

I'm not saying Yondu's funeral was unearned, per se. He was one of my favorite characters in the Guardians series. I just can't help but wonder, are we going to get an indulgent funeral sequence every time one of the hundred or so regular characters in the Marvel stable dies?