MOVIE REVIEW: 'Guardians' of the franchise

Let's take a quick inventory here: We have a beautiful, green woman holding a serious vorpal-type blade; a shirtless, bald blue hunk wearing work boots; a different bald, blue dude with terrible teeth and a glowing arrow that follows his whistle; a white boy with a Walkman; a miniature shrub with arms and legs; and, oh yeah, a homicidal raccoonlike biped holding a blaster rifle and snarling. Looking at the movie poster for this sequel, you kind of have to wonder: How did we get here?

The original Guardians of the Galaxy was a thoroughly bug-nuts mix of pop culture jokes, emotional pathos, wackadoo CGI imaginings, and an assortment of utterly bizarre characters, all united around a common thread of FM pop radio songs from the '70s and '80s. It was the kind of movie you couldn't have successfully described to a friend who hadn't seen it yet -- "OK, there's a walking tree who only says, 'I am Groot,' but his best friend is a woodland creature with a serious gun fetish" -- in large part because it swirled almost entirely around James Gunn's peculiar sensibilities, utilizing a host of heavily marginalized Marvel characters, and managing to stitch together all of these incongruent lunacies to work in concert.

For the sequel, Gunn has stuck to the formula that worked so well in the first film, and even if you can feel the strain of repetition, he has come up with another pert, entertaining yarn about the unshakable bonds between intergalactic families, bound by blood or otherwise.

When we meet up with them again, the Guardians are back in typical form, defending a planet of extremely snooty, genetically superior people from the unwelcome intrusion of a giant space squid, which is attracted to the enormous power encased in the planet's glowing power batteries, over the pulsing melodies of "Mr. Blue Sky." Wrapping up the caper, Peter Quill's Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) leads his entourage, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper), and miniaturized Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) to meet with Ayesha (Elizabeth Debicki), the haughty high priestess of the planet.

Running afoul of their leaders, by dint of Rocket helping himself to some of the exact same batteries the Guardians just defended, the team is soon set upon by the snobbish, golden-skinned denizens of the planet, who give chase with space drones they pilot from the safety of their command center (in one of the film's more amusing conceits, the pilots of these drones mount onto their control decks like so many kids at Dave & Busters, complete with 'Game Over' music, when their ships are destroyed).

Desperate to escape the horde of automated ships firing upon them, the Guardians end up crash-landing on a planet where they are soon met by Ego (Kurt Russell), a Celestial being, who has come to whisk them away to his home planet, and who also happens to be Peter Quinn's long lost father. The team breaks in half, with several going to join Quill on his journey, and Groot, Rocket, and Gamora's half-sister, the insanely bitter Nebula (Karen Gillan), captured as a bounty from their last gig, left behind to make ship repairs.

Ego's planet turns out to be a stunning, multicolored oasis that, curiously, has no other life forms save for his attendant, Mantis (Pom Klementieff), an empath with fleshy antennae over her baleful eyes, and the flora all around them. There is, naturally, a reason the planet is so devoid of other living creatures, a situation one might have anticipated given the man's very name, and the Guardians are eventually reunited to help prevent the destruction of the universe, yet again.

Through it all, Gunn's film swings in a dizzying array of mood changes, an ungainly mixture of goofy jokes, sentimentality, serious action and Fleetwood Mac songs ("The Chain" factors greatly into the fiery climax). When it works, as with the breakout scene of the film, after Rocket and Groot have been captured by the spurned ravager Yondu (Michael Rooker), and his band of cutthroats, just before his men spawn a mutiny behind the fearsome Taserface (Chris Sullivan), a nom de plume that Rocket can't stop ridiculing, it's a vibrant combination of enthralling amusement.

At other times, though, with Quinn struggling to come to grips with reuniting with his father after all this time, and his confusion as to where his loyalties lie, the film's dedicated desire to avoid getting bogged down makes it impossible to do more than skim the surface of whatever emotions the characters might be feeling. The result is a film trying too hard to have it all ways at once, shamelessly tugging at heartstrings, even as it's simultaneously taking shots at your funny bone.

Unfortunately, Gunn's more sober themes -- families divided and ostracized from one another -- gives those scenes a sense of gravity pretty clearly unearned, even as the ending rolls around with our misfit space family suffering a tragic loss. Pratt, as ever, is made for roles such as this, where he gets to be both the doofy clown and the sincere object of mawkish sympathy, but here, with so little grounding (the one scene of he and his dad bonding involves a corny game of catch with a glowing orb of energy), the character cuts from what would seem to be catastrophic loss with quippy jokes and his trademark amiable sarcasm. Like characters in a sitcom, even after what would be a thoroughly wrenching emotional crisis, the wisecracks keep on coming.

Make no mistake, though, hard-core fans of the original will definitely not be disappointed. It's all there -- the bantering interaction between the perpetually bickering Guardians (Rocket calls Quill "Star Munch" more than once), the comic highlights (one line concerning a certain iconic Julie Andrews character brought the house down), the relentless churning of bad '80s pop culture references (several '80s-era action stars make appearances amid the revelry), the endless harping on the emotional boundaries of family, ELO songs. And it's all in much the same proportion, but there is also a certain rote quality to the proceedings, as if each character has to step up on stage and hit his or her mark, like intergalactic Sweathogs. It's kind of unavoidable that a follow-up film to such a surprising original would lose some of its heat simply by being more of a known quantity. But for much of the film's riotous comedy, we can't help but feel as if we've already laughed at this joke before.

It's an incredibly difficult thing to achieve, retaining the flavor of the original enough to satisfy fans of the repetitive status quo while creating just enough points of friction between previous installments that it still feels as if it's breaking new ground (as far as space fantasy goes, look at Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back and keep staring in awe). You can't blame James Gunn for being satisfied to utilize a play list that keeps churning out the hits, but you'll also likely be leaving the theater with a different sort of look on your face.

MovieStyle on 05/05/2017