The comedy stylings of the Guardians movies can grate when everyone starts yelling at each other like a big budget episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but what’s more common is a successful balance of characterization and humor. Rocket’s chaotic, discursive sarcasm was key to this dynamic, brought to life by Cooper’s invested voice performance, so a story that requires putting Rocket into a coma by minute fifteen is giving itself a high degree of difficulty. Once the plot settles in, the film doesn’t jettison Rocket entirely, but his comedically hampered comrades in the present are not helped by long flashbacks to Rocket’s pre-Guardians life in the captivity of the High Evolutionary. Believe it or not, lab animals being experimented on also does not equal a barrel of vivisected monkeys. It’s not like Gunn doesn’t occasionally go heavy. The franchise began with young Peter watching his emaciated mother die from cancer, but it then followed that up with an undeniably joyous sequence of adult Peter to Redbone under the credits. Guardians 3 has none of that contrast, sticking with the down notes at the expense of any fun.
However, the film can’t be written off because of how consistent the franchise has stayed throughout all entries. I don’t know what the four Thor movies are about, or if Ant-Man has a thematic linkage, but Guardians finds drama in its motley crew of characters, all broken in their own ways despite their ability to recreate family amongst themselves. Their villains frequently have aims of creating the world in their own image, especially the High Evolutionary and his pursuit of organic perfection. The Guardians are purveyors of good-enough, where they know things aren’t perfect and that’s ok. Bautista’s Drax always affects me the most, because he’s this hulking oaf given to belly laughs and unfiltered streams of consciousness who still carries around the pain of a lost family, pain brought to wistful, heartbroken life by a Bautista who has access to a depth of tenderness. A perfected Drax would need the High Evolutionary to snip out the pain and the bad memories from his brain, but the film has no use for perfect protagonists. Guardians 3 leans too heavily into the characters’ brokenness at the expense of their togetherness, and though that makes for a less fun film, it at least fits with the path of the trilogy.
Thematic consistency is ultimately not enough to hold the film together. Less joke density means the volume-rising tone that the characters speak to each other in doesn’t get leavened with a laugh. This part of the MCU has always had the most imaginative worlds and that stays true here with a biomass space station like something out of Akira, but who wants to squish around its insides when the characters are turned more toward annoying than endearing? The plot is elongated because of impatience and miscommunication, because no major blockbuster can be less than 150 minutes, and the supposedly concluding chapter of a trilogy feels more like continuing adventures. Can’t let billion dollar characters earn an ending. Gunn’s got more success than failures on his big-budget resume, especially after the bloody accusation against American imperialism that was somehow The Suicide Squad. Maybe he knew it was time to get out of Disney after being dropped in the wake of a ginned-up social media controversy. Like all the rest of the MCU, Guardians provides no safe harbor from the creeping rot that’s killing the rest of the franchise. Let something better grow out of its corpse. C