Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: An Enjoyable Movie With Disappointing Emotional Moments

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 had a bit of a troubled production cycle. At one point writer/director James Gunn was fired, then hired by DC to make The Suicide Squad, and then rehired by Marvel to make this movie. From the beginning, this was billed to be the final adventure for this iteration of the titular team, and it sort of stumbles across that finish line. That said, the movie is still enjoyable with all the heart and comedy that one would come to expect from the Guardians, however it tries to score cheap emotional points which will work to varying degrees depending on the person.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 follows the titular team as they are dealing with their new status quo following Avengers: Endgame and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is still mourning the end of his relationship with Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) while the rest of the team consisting of Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillen), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Groot (Vin Diesel), Kraglin (Sean Gunn), Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and Cosmo the Space Dog (Maria Bakalova) is living on Knowhere which is functioning as their base of operations. When an attack by Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) leaves a member of the team seriously injured, the rest of the members set out to save their life in a quest that brings them into direct conflict with the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). Elizabeth Debicki, Sylvester Stallone, and Nico Santos also star.

The movie does not hold the viewer’s hand and kind of expects them to remember plot points from both The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. There are a few retcons in that regard (specifically the second movie and the origins of the Sovereign), however, by and large, the viewer is thrown into the deep end and expected to remember that the Sovereign was hunting down the Guardians because Rocket stole some batteries in the first act of the second movie. It does not play a huge role once they reach Ego but it does have a substantial role in this film and is not explained.

The biggest problem the movie has is that the emotional moments that are obviously there just to quickly score emotional points are very much entirely for the audience and not for the characters in the narrative. These are all flashbacks but they are not flashbacks that the other characters are privy to which means they are purely for the viewer to understand the story. The issue is that they grind the plot to a halt to exposit this information which has minimal impact on the actual narrative of the movie. At one point the rest of the characters find out parts of the story, but at that point, they know less than the audience and what more the audience knows is not enough to have made the trip worthwhile. To an extent, there is more value in keeping the details ambiguous because what the audience fills in after hints can be better than what is shown.

It does have the same heart and charm as the previous movies with some great comedic moments as well. There is some interesting production design and cool lore expansions for the wider MCU, however, there are just as many poorly shot and hard-to-follow action sequences and places where the image looks washed out. There are a number of James Gunn-adjacent cameos that go on way too long and, in a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie, is very obvious. That said, there is an impressive action sequence in the third act that is just below the Jay and the Americans sequence from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

There is enough good in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
to make it worth watching as it is as good a Marvel movie as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings but just below Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Spider-Man: No Way Home. There are enough big effects sequences to make it worth seeing on a premium format screen and may even warrant multiple trips to a theater to see.

Final Rating: 8/10