'Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3' Review: The Guardians Get A Tonally Awkward, Emotional Sendoff
(L-R): Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Dave Bautista as Drax, Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Zoe Saldana as Gamora, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Karen Gillan as Nebula, and Pom Klementieff as Mantis in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
Great superhero movie trilogies are hard to make. Almost always, there’s a drop in quality somewhere along the way or an ending that leaves its viewers unhappy. Now, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 attempts to do the one thing that most MCU trilogies have failed at: giving all of its characters a satisfying ending. For Spider-Man, Peter was left alone, broke, and technically not existing. With Captain America, the titular character and his associates ended up in prison. To close out the Iron Man trilogy, Tony Stark gave up a part of what made him Iron Man. In Infinity War, half our favorite characters died. In case you can’t catch where I’m going with this, Marvel trilogies don’t usually end with the hero(es) having a happy ending with everything going their way, and that’s one of the things that James Gunn aimed to fix with his latest (and final) Marvel film, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.
The film, set after Avengers: Endgame (and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special), finds the leading team on Knowhere as they‘re rebuilding their lives in a post-Thanos world. This looks different for every member of the team, with some turning to more connection with their friends and others turning to alcohol (dark, I know). Like the previous two Guardians films, we open with a song. This time, however, it’s not an uplifting beat or classic hit, but an acoustic rendition of Radiohead’s Creep, set over a sequence of Rocket Racoon (Bradley Cooper) walking alone throughout Knowhere as the rest of the Guardians are connecting with others. This sets the tone for the film, which aims to take a more somber path and spotlight one character’s story in particular. Initially, everything seems to be going okay for the Guardians, all things considered. That is, until Adam Warlock (Will Poulter [yes, the kid from We’re the Millers]) shows up, ordered to capture Rocket by request of the man who tortured and made Rocket what he is today, the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji).
(L-R): Zoe Saldana as Gamora and Chris Pratt as Peter Quill/Star-Lord in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo by Jessica Miglio. © 2022 MARVEL.
Fortunately for Rocket, he’s surrounded by the galaxy’s top team of a-holes, who instantly leap into battle to fend off Warlock. Unfortunately, the altercation leaves Rocket in a terrible condition, setting a timer on his life. Now, you might be thinking, “Well, can’t they just send him to a doctor or heal him?” No, because that’d be too convenient. Instead, we learn that the High Evolutionary put a kill switch on Rocket’s heart so that if the cybernetic technology inside him was tampered with, he’d instantly be killed. This sends the Guardians on a quest to get the override key that will allow them to save their friend, but in doing so are forced to face the man who tormented Rocket and many others. While this development certainly ups the emotional stakes of the movie, it ultimately fails to convey the required urgency to nail emotional beats instead of simply walking into them. That said, even the emotional beats, many of which come at times that undercut the overall story and pacing, don’t work because of how tonally unsure they are. With a runtime of two hours and 30 minutes (the longest in the trilogy), Vol. 3 flies through its story at a pace so rapid that it leaves one wondering how much of the film was left on the cutting room floor, and whether multiple sequences needed to be included at all.
When it comes to Vol. 3’s tone, the film has no idea what it wants to be. One minute, it wants us to be excited by the adventure and colorful action filling the screen, and it wants us to cry the next. While this can be made to work, there is no carefully constructed shift of tone at a midpoint, more so a constant back-and-forth of vibe, leading to an overall disconnect from any emotional resonance waiting to be found. The fact of the matter is that unless you have significant emotional attachments to the majority of the characters in this movie, the emotional moments simply won’t land with you. That wouldn’t be necessarily awful if it weren’t for the fact that Vol. 3 uses them so ineffectively that, when paired with the general lack of emotional stakes and risks in a Marvel movie, the emotion fails to come through spare for a few moments.
(L-R): Teefs (voiced by Asim Chaudry), Lylla (voiced by Linda Cardellini), Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), and Fllor (voiced by Mikela Hoover) in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.
In regards to the film’s characters — there are a lot of them — Vol. 3 takes the approach of giving almost every individual character “their moment,” allowing them to have a final hurrah. While, as a thought, this seems like a good choice, it doesn’t work in the context of the film, with these moments getting repetitive and less impactful the more they happen. This becomes evidently clear toward the film’s climax, when, instead of having a personal, grounded conflict between our true protagonist and the man that tormented him for years, we get yet another big CGI fight that again contradicts the personal aspects of the film. For some characters — the ones more connected to the story — Gunn’s writing allows them to become fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters with understandable motives and conflicts. Rocket, the character who gets the most time to shine in this entry, is truly three-dimensional and easily becomes one of the best-written characters across the entire MCU. To be clear, that isn’t the case for every character, including the film’s villain, who is almost as one-note as you can get, regardless of how sadistically unhinged Chukwudi Iwuji makes him out to be. Another character that gets the short end of the stick is Adam Warlock, who gets treated and written as a literal child, except he’s 6’3” and has superpowers.
If one thing is a constant in Guardians of the Galaxy movies, it’s the use of music to move the plot and convey the characters’ emotions, and that’s once again the case here. The difference, however, between the use of music in this film versus the previous two Guardians films it that in this case, the music, which used to aid the story, is used significantly more often, as if James Gunn spun a wheel of old songs that he liked and told an intern to go get the rights. To be fair, not every needle drop is senseless, with a particular Florence + the Machine song playing toward the end in the one scene that got me to tear up.
(L-R): Miriam Shor as Recorder Vim, Chukwudi Iwuji as The High Evolutionary, and Nico Santos as Recorder Theel in Marvel Studios' Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Photo by Jessica Miglio. © 2023 MARVEL.
But alas, this brings us to the end of this review and back to its beginning. When it comes to giving characters a grand sendoff/finale, one would hope that they not only get satisfying endings but that they’ve actually earned them. And somehow, against everything not going for him, James Gunn mostly accomplishes his goal of giving every character at least a somewhat satisfying finale. He does this in different ways, leaving certain characters’ exact fates up in the air, allowing future filmmakers to continue their stories while clarifying the precise outcome of the film’s events and the repercussions it has on others. What’s ultimately clear about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is how much of a family this film’s cast is and how much they care about the project. Regardless of whether or not each beat hits or the plot is as strong as it could be, or how most of the performances are one-note, the people who made this movie truly care about it, and that’s about as much as we can ask of them.
