Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

IMDB Rating : 8.8/10 (as on 24.04.2017)

PG-13 | 2h 17min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

 Set to the backdrop of 'Awesome Mixtape #2,' Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 continues the team's adventures as they traverse the outer reaches of the cosmos. The Guardians must fight to keep their newfound family together as they unravel the mysteries of Peter Quill's true parentage. Old foes become new allies and fan-favorite characters from the classic comics will come to our heroes' aid as the Marvel cinematic universe continues to expand.

Director: James Gunn

Writers: James Gunn, Dan Abnett (based on the Marvel comics by)

Stars: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista

IMDB Link Here

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆  

'Gooey euphoria'

Robbie Collin  

Are Marvel Studios bound by the same child labour laws as everyone else? The reason I ask is that the production design team on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 appears to have been entirely composed of sugared-up three and four-years-olds going berserk. Not that the first Guardians of the Galaxy film, a swashbuckling science-fiction offshoot from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was a paragon of Bressonian austerity to start with.

But the new one – and this is meant as a heartfelt compliment – looks like an explosion in a nursery school craft cupboard. Every scene comes caked in rainbows, glitter, gunge and bubble mixture: if there had been a cost-effective way to stick dried pasta shapes and pipe cleaners to every cinema screen showing the thing, director James Gunn would have probably reached for his glue spreader.

That sense of gooey euphoria runs through everything that’s good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2, which inches even further to the end of the limb the original Guardians film went out on in 2014. Take note of the "Vol 2" in its title, too: it feels less like a sequel than another yarn from the annals, as if you’d pulled a forgotten comic-book anthology from the shelf, blown the dust off and dove in. The core crew returns, led by Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), essentially a buffer and be-dorked Han Solo – though the sentient tree Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel, has been pruned back to a big-eyed sapling, making the character all but indistinguishable from his own tie-in vinyl collectible figure.

In a 1980-set prologue, Russell becomes the third Marvel actor, after Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jnr, to undergo digital de-ageing, an effect that’s still a long way from losing its capacity for causal astonishment. (As with Douglas and Downey, the fun of it is recognising the face from films long past: in this case, Escape from New York.) Along with the lean, green, mean Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and pebbledashed galoot Drax (Dave Bautista), Peter travels to Ego’s home planet, a kind of lightly stoned paradise filled with the kind of vistas and architecture rarely seen outside of prog-rock album sleeves, and faux-naîf ceramic statuary to make Jeff Koons flip his lid.

That Vol 2 makes time for this kind of thing – not to mention a steady flow of winking gags and cameos – shows that we are worlds apart, in every sense, from the severe and sprawling canvases of Doctor Strange and Captain America: Civil War. Here the fate of the galaxy may hang in the balance, but the stakes often couldn’t feel lower. Take the fleet of spacecraft commanded by Elizabeth Debicki’s gold-plated alien priestess (the actress’s flair for poker-faced camp is as much fun here as in The Man from UNCLE) which hounds the Guardians throughout. Her pilots aren’t strapped in their cockpits in the heat of battle, but working them remotely from a multi-tiered video-game arcade, surrounded by retro bleeps and chirps. Even in its most tempestuous action set-pieces, the film is only playing.

Read full review  at Telegraph

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟☆☆  

Funny sequel suffers from pinballing pointlessness

Peter Bradshaw  

Marvel’s likeable superhero comedy Guardians of the Galaxy is back for amiable and goofy volume number two, and its beefy-yet-quirky space hero and team leader Peter Quill, played by Chris Pratt, duly has a second volume of that Awesome Mixtape on the Sony Walkman he has on him at all times.

It’s the same combination of cartoony action and intergalactic screwball with some ambient production design recalling the photorealist sci-fi imagery of Roger Dean or Chris Foss in a bygone age, creating a visual sense of earnestness to offset the archly retro pop culture gags. Again, it has its own supercharged Heart FM playlist of 70s and 80s music. The early 70s track Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) by Looking Glass is laid on the soundtrack almost ecstatically in the opening sequence, and some tongue-in-cheek dialogue later invokes it as the greatest piece of music ever to have emerged from Planet Earth. This film rattles along and there’s a lot to enjoy, but there’s a weird air of pointlessness, almost plotlessness to this sequel.

The old gang are still together: as well as Quill, there is the green-faced Gamora, played by Zoe Saldana, and the mighty, slab-like Drax, played by Dave Bautista.

There are, once again, some funny lines, very often given to Drax, who has a way of oversharing. Pom Clementieff is very entertaining in the role of Mantis, a helpmeet of Ego; she has the gift of being an empath, someone who can intuit how someone else is feeling by laying hands on them, but is in every other fantastically naive and un-insightful about the way human beings behave.

Ego himself introduces some apparently huge Freudian issues to the film, which on paper would seem to take the film’s emotional impact up a notch or two. But they are dealt with insouciantly, even flippantly – far more so than in something like Star Wars or Superman. That’s in keeping of course, with the distinctive comic flavour of this franchise, but the revelations about Quill’s background just zing and ping around with the same pinball-velocity as everything else in the film. It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

Read full review at The Guardian

 James Gunn's sequel to the 2014 Marvel hit brings the gang — including Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and the voices of Vin Diesel and Bradley Cooper — back together for more.  

Todd McCarthy  

When a disarmingly wacky and amusing B-team of Marvel characters parachuted in three summers ago and made off with a worldwide haul of $771 million, the fifth biggest of any Marvel production, Guardians of the Galaxy resembled a makeshift expansion sports franchise that somehow played above its own level all year long and snuck into the World Series. But the second season brings this team back to reality, if not to planet Earth, and while the stadiums will remain packed, the results on the field are not nearly so pretty for this manic and sometimes grating continuation of a scattershot narrative, in which the survival of the universe is treated far more glibly than its knotty superhero daddy issues.

Alas, most of these maverick mercenaries prove rather less charming the second time around; they're like bickering family now and not in an amusing way. For starters, some of the characters who, at first exposure, were ingratiating in part because of their rough edges have now turned downright ornery and are not much fun to be around. First and foremost of these is Zoe Saldana's green-skinned assassin Gamora, whose every line now seems barked out in an elevated state of annoyance. Part of her problem is that her equally badass sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) has returned and not only tries to harm her, but also brings up their unpleasant family history. But even before this, Gamora is in a rotten mood, ostensibly for having to babysit so many loony colleagues.

Then there's Rocket the cybernetically enhanced raccoon (voiced once again by Bradley Cooper), whose ill-tempered wisecracks have curdled in inverse proportion to the growth of his ego. Impatient and far too taken with his own abilities, he's prematurely become a genuine curmudgeon annoyed by everyone and everything. Or maybe stardom's just gone to his head.

At the bottom of the food chain is Baby Groot. His famously three-words-capable forebear having sacrificed himself in Vol. 1, the baby is a literal splinter of the original and spends most of his time observing things warily with big ink-pool eyes. Vin Diesel is back to provide vocals for this critter, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify the speaker just from hearing him, and if the actor spent more than an hour in studio recording his stuff it was too long. Nice payday.

As far as the original crew is concerned, this leaves just two guys. Evidently forbidden by contract ever to appear with a shirt on, Dave Bautista's Drax has more to do this time around in that he's given increased opportunities to burst out laughing at events as they transpire; would that the audience had as many occasions for it. All the same, the muscle man wrestler generates more mirth and goodwill than anyone else does and seems genuinely glad to be on board for the journey, wherever it takes them.

But burrowed in somewhere among the more or less random space battles, showdowns, shoot-outs, personal fights and hair-breadth encounters with instant oblivion, which are mostly staged in a visually elaborate but manically suspense-free manner, is the opportunity for Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) to get to know his father (Kurt Russell). The latter, simply known as Ego but whose full name is the even more memorable Ego the Living Planet, is an ambiguous figure birthed by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby over a half-century ago. Although there is doubtless more to this mysterious character than initially meets the eye, he cuts a largely benign figure here as he begins to part the clouds of uncertainty of heritage and mission that have plagued his son, aka Star-Lord. The scenes between the well-cast Russell and Pratt are the best in the film, the one occasion Gunn calms down a bit to stage meaningful exchanges.

The heavy, elaborate action is both plentiful and rote; in their geometric design and execution, the special effects feel exceedingly computer-generated. Unlike, say, the best space battles in the Star Wars series, the frantic ballistic parrying here often makes the viewer feel as if trapped inside a pinball machine. The attitude toward all the violence and mayhem is mostly good-humored, casual and tossed off, which provokes a few good laughs and chuckles, and writer-director Gunn gets away with a lot of lame stuff simply by moving on quickly to the next gag or explosion. As before, his bluffly cynical, good-times attitude supplies a devil-may-care feel to the proceedings that's quite appealing to audiences. But Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 plays like a second ride on a roller coaster that was a real kick the first time around but feels very been-there/done-that now.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

Movie Rating 🌟🌟🌟☆☆  

Marvel sequel suffers from arrested development

Jake Wilson

When we last saw the cocky half-human Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) and his fellow Guardians of the Galaxy, they were lighting out in their spaceship in search of adventure, vowing to do something good, something bad, or a little of both – which, let's face it, is as cogent a statement on American foreign policy as we're likely to hear any time soon.

I would willingly have left them there, forever young and with the cosmos at their disposal. But the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which the Guardians inhabit, is founded on the principle that there's always room for another sequel – meaning, regrettably, that nothing ever ends for good.

As it happens, more than one character here explicitly has a shot at immortality, though writer-director James Gunn has a lot of plot to get through first. We find the Guardians in the midst of a routine skirmish with a bug-eyed monster – while the most adorable of them, reborn vegetation god Baby Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), frolics indifferent to the danger.

While Gunn doubles down on his risky creative choices from the first Guardians film, he does so without eliminating the sense that what we're getting is more of the same. That might be inevitable, given how far his approach depends on the wilful refusal to mature: the clownish makeup designs and swirling paintbox nebulae, the one-liners that smack of the playground, and the joyous mass killings set to a golden oldie playlist presumably drawn from his own childhood.

But if this new Guardians lacks the novelty of its predecessor it retains the unnerving edge of hysteria, with ever more frequent reminders that nearly all the protagonists have trauma in their past. Quill witnessed the death of his mother before being kidnapped, Rocket is the mutant creation of cruel scientists, Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista​) saw his entire family slaughtered, and Gamora was forced to battle her sister Nebula (Karen Gillan) who still seeks revenge.

The obvious exception to the rule is the newborn Groot, who appears to have suffered little from his death and resurrection. Truth be told, the character has been a bit like a baby all along, his vocabulary limited to a single sentence ("I am Groot") which his companions, like doting parents, interpret in various ways.

For me, Baby Groot marks the point where willed arrested development starts to seem like a trap, fusing with the broader Marvel imperative to keep the wheels spinning while ensuring nothing really changes. It's telling, too, that the means have been found to bring a baby into this surrogate family without anyone needing to have sex – another sign that the childishness of the series runs deep, in ways that wind up limiting Gunn's options when he drops the pretence of irony to work himself up for a big, schmaltzy finish.

 Read full review at Sydney morning Herald