Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is the 15th Marvel Studios film and sees the return of Star Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and Baby Groot (Vin Diesel) and this time Star Lord and the gang are on the run from the Sovereign and it's high priestess (Elizabeth Debicki) but the gang may end up in a much bigger scenario than as originally thought.
I was pretty nervous going into this movie mainly because of my disappointment with 2015's Avengers Sequel Age of Ultron and the first Guardians film is my favorite MCU film save for the first Avengers film so could the gang rise to the occasion or fail like glorious A holes who stuff up.
Well it's really a case of neither as while the film is fun to watch at times and has some great visual effects the films storytelling and use of the characters falls way short but it is nowhere near the disaster that Age of Ultron was mainly because for most of the running time I was enjoying primarily the new characters played by Kurt Russell, Debicki and Pom Klementieff who plays Mantis.
But aside from that new burst of flavour this is a classic case of a raspberry soft drink that has now gone flat and the main reason is that the film doesn't really have a lot of the heart and the warmth and the genuine sharply focused fun that the first film did this time all of the space battles and mixtape songs and I Am Groot and interpersonal bickering doesn't really feel all that different from the first film and nor does it feel like it's evolved in any way since the end of the last film.
It also doesn't help that the bickering becomes really loud and incredibly annoying after a while and the way that the film treats its female characters in particular really started to bother me after a while and it gave the film this almost pre pubescent view of girls that made me cringe a little bit because girls like these films and have been looking forward to this one and they deserve a lot better than to have those female characters treated in a way that feels disrespectful towards them.
And also when I think about this movie a bit more I feel that this is why I feel so guarded and so nervous about approaching the sequel to a film I really like (there are some exceptions of course like the upcoming Kingsman sequel) and I really feel very very strongly that if you are going to make a sequel you should do something with it that pushes the ball down the field and deepens the characters somewhat.
And it has been done in this genre Bryan Singer did it with X-Men 2 back in 2003 a superior film to the first X-Men film, Christopher Nolan did it brilliantly with the Dark Knight in 2008 which was a step up from Batman Begins in every step of the way and Richard Donner would've done it as well had he been given the chance to properly finish Superman II his way back in 1979 given he now had a proper adversary for Chris Reeve's Superman to face off against.
And that above all is what disappointments me most about this sequel nothing new feels genuinely achieved this time and that was enormously frustrating for me when I came out of this movie and yes the visual effects are great and the new characters are fun but without those fundamentals of good storytelling and strong character arcs and motivations it just becomes frosting on a not very nice cake for me.
And so that was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 not a bad sequel for sure but nothing really feels achieved or justified here it just feels like more of the same and it made me want for Thanos to show up even more and shake things up in this universe, 2 out of 5.
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