Film Review - Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (2023)

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 is the third Guardians film and the last film to star this cast (Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Karen Gillan, Pom Klementieff and Dave Bautista) and be written and directed by James Gunn and this film sees Rocket Racoon (Cooper) critically injured in an attack by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) so the other Guardians race to save his life which brings them into conflict with the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji.)

Guardians 3 was a movie I had mixed hopes for going into for while I loved Volume 1 in 2014 I didn’t care for Volume 2 in 2017 and it was decent and entertaining but nowhere near the first film plus I felt I had said my goodbyes to this cast along with the MCU as a whole with Avengers Infinity War and Endgame so could this film deliver the goods or would the Guardians series go the way of others where the first film was good but the sequels fell rather short.

Well I did enjoy it but its not without problems but before I delve into those I do think that this movie is a good, solid entertaining movie that does its job well enough and hits its marks just fine, the cast are good as they have been in their roles in the last few films and James Gunn does a good job writing and directing the film and delivering the usual visual effects action moments that actually do look a bit better here than they have in the last few MCU movies and TV shows.

But those problems and there are 2 big ones I had with this movie:

- The first of those is James Gunn’s sense of humour, now like I said Gunn did a good job writing and directing the film on the whole but his sense of humour has always been a little edgy owing to his background in the Troma production world and it’s a style of humour that doesn’t really work for me now most humour in movies especially nowadays rarely if ever works for me but here it put me off a fair bit at times and left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

- And the second is the numerous scenes of animal cruelty in this movie, this movie is very much about Rocket and his backstory which was hinted at in the first Guardians film and is very much front and centre here and while some scenes reminded me a lot of the early scenes from Babe in 1995 the more these scenes went on I felt that the dividing line had been crossed for me as it was too much and look I love dark movies but I think now more care needs to be taken when depiciting violence against groups like women, children and animals.

And if I could say one thing to James Gunn regarding his upcoming Superman: Legacy movie for Warner Brothers I would say to him PLEASE dial down the edginess for that film, as someone who loves Supeman I don’t want another dark or edgy Superman movie, Bryan Singer and Zack Snyder gave us those with Superman Returns and Man of Steel and they failed not only as movies in their own right but failed to be worthy of the legacy of Richard Donner and Christopher Reeve and I hope that this new movie he’s making will bring back that heart, that wonder, that majesty and that Humanity of Superman because lord knows we need it now more than we ever have.

And so that was Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and it’s a good solid end for James Gunn’s time on this series and his main ensemble cast but his darker tendencies hold it down for me and I hope he does away with them for Superman: Legacy, 3 out of 5.