'Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2' Is A Heavier Ride Than The Original, What With All The Daddy Issues

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL.2

"So we’re saving the galaxy again?" says the CGI raccoon who refuses to be called a raccoon. "Awesome! We’re really gonna be able to jack up our price if we’re two-time galaxy-savers."

It’s a gag that says everything about Guardians Of The Galaxy: goofy, irreverent, self-aware, sometimes functioning as a kind of meta-Marvel movie. Here, a super-hero team-up saves the galaxy (again) in an incandescent orgy of eye-popping CGI, and everything — budget, salaries, expectations, integration within the MCU’s corporate plot for box office domination — is, indeed, jacked up.

Vol. 2 naturally lacks the surprise of 2014’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, a kooky comedy that marked an outlier for Marvel by not burnishing the entrenched brand of a familiar IP, nor feeding into the Avengers mothership. Back in those long-gone days of Obama’s America, a host of heroes unknown to all but the most rapacious comic-book consumers banded together in a big-budget B-movie that was an A-list success. Without the need to tell that same old origin story again (how many times have you seen Bruce Wayne’s parents die?), writer/director James Gunn was freed up to make a film that was, y’know, actual fun; allowed to make something silly and trashy, weird and wild. And, underneath its interstellar grandeur and cartoonish excess, the wild fantasy it was really selling was, simply, the fantasy of the lonely misfit finding a group of friends.

Here, those friends are back, only with added gravity. They’re not just friends; instead, as Dave Bautista’s Drax The Destroyer solemnly intones, now they’re family (cue: horrifying FF8 flashbacks). And, family becomes the dramatic centre of the film, which battles against the diminishing returns of sequels by emphasising emotions. In the world of American cinema, this means back-stories. Which, in Vol. 2, means daddy issues.

Here, Chris Pratt’s space-orphan turns out to be the spawn of Kurt Russell (and, with the small-role appearance of Sylvester Stallone herein, we come thiiiiis close to a Tango & Cash reunion). In a cutesy cold-open, Russell struts about on 1980 Earth in feathered-hair and fly convertible, with Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl) playing on the 8-track stereo. And he loves his girl so much that he takes her behind the Dairy Queen and gets her pregnant.

One comic ‘34 Years Later’ smash-cut later, with the Guardians on the run from a race of golden eugenicists — whose fleet of drones are piloted, from back home, in the space-future-utopia equivalent of an arcade full of Manx TT Superbike cabinets — Russell offers our gang safe harbour on his planet; ol’ pops both feathered-hair’d man of “rugged good looks” and immortal god who has manifested himself as entire planet.

If this sounds suspect — or, perhaps, stupid — know that his character is based on Ego The Living Planet, a comic-book villain long depicted as — seriously — a purple planet with a Van Dyke beard (and also, once, the inspiration for an almighty Monster Magnet riff). And if anything is going to trigger one’s daddy issues, it’s learning that the deadbeat dad you never knew is an immortal space-god of infinite power and upwardly mobile ambitions, who didn’t stick around because he needed to tend to the Edenic space-paradise that is his true form.

Where Pratt emotes over the burden of the absent father (introducing a great recurring gag about David Hasselhoff, which Gunn pushes way further than you could ever imagine), both Zoe Saldana and Karen Gillan wrestle with the trauma of having an abusive father. They’re the siblings — one painted green, the other purple and blue — whose dad trained them to be assassins, getting them to constantly fight each other in some perverse stage-parent Thunderdome. Having long been made rivals, now they hate each other, to the point where Gillan longs to sadistically murder sis.

Only, it turns out, via some unexpected Vol. 2 female bonding, that they don’t hate each other, only themselves. And their dad! Fuck that guy. Y’know, the big blue throne-sitter with the wrinkly chin that’s been ongoing MCU cocktease since the first Avengers, thereby rendering each instalment — and threat to blow up Earth — essentially non-threatening, knowing that the final boss is yet to show? Here, he’s evoked, and cried over, and railed against, but never shows up, instead being saved to be one of the 25(!) comic-book IPs scheduled to populate next year’s Infinity War.

The placing of this Guardians Of The Galaxy story squarely within the greater Marvel money-makin’ universe makes it feel less like an outlier; no longer just the jokey black sheep of the family. And, ultimately, Vol. 2 feels far more like a streamlined product than the original did: a familiar-feeling but essentially ‘meh’ movie-going experience. Things that delighted the first time around — the jokiness; the ’80s kitsch; the Scorsese-gone-3D ultra-violent set-pieces played out to a played-out ’70s-AM-radio soundtrack; the notion of saving the galaxy given the dramatic weight it deserves (i.e. none) — are served up again, but can only offer less delight the second time.

In his first film, Gunn got to just deliver gags. This time, he wields weight, summons up the emo feels, and handles Avengers-related plot points. Prices and expectations aren’t the only things jacked up this time; so are responsibilities. And, for a film about irresponsible rogues, that’s not an ideal starting point.