Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 - review

I'll start off by saying - I didn't like it. I don't know that that's entirely it's fault. 

Mild Spoilers

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 suffers from trying to deal with the burdens passed to it by the grievous and unforgiveable mistakes of Avengers Infinity War/Endgame. A fair amount of the movie has to deal with the whole Gamora-isn't-Gamora-anymore problem, and that takes up time from other things.

We'll never know if that screen time could have been dedicated to turning the Adam Warlock subplot into an actual subplot. As it stands, he's just this gold skinned, superpowered disaster who shows up, creates havoc and then disappears long enough for you to forget he's even in this movie until he shows up again and creates more havoc. The tornados in Twister are more developed characters.

The actual story - delving Rocket's backstory - into basically an emotionally manipulative indictment of animal testing. The villain is probably one of the few totally irredeemably evil villains of modern cinema. Unfortunately, our "heroes" don't actually appear to care about him, or about the people he's hurting... at least not until the very end of the movie.

... and about our heroes. The once cocky, goofy and fun Starlord spends most of the time moping. Drax has been reduced to a punchline (I blame Vol 2 for that). Nebula and Mantis, despite a good efforts, never seem to really work as part of the group... maybe because we never really got a chance to see them become fully fledged parts of the group. We're just expected to believe they are. Rocket is the only one who remains Rocket and shows consistent growth across the three movies. Well, and Groot. Groot is still Groot but that fact that I forgot him should tell you something.

It's implied (actually it's said outright) that this was always Rocket's story. I don't think that's strictly true, but his was the only story that remains true to itself. Unfortunately, Rocket spends most of the movie unconscious, so the fact that his is the only story worth a damn doesn't save the movie. 

I think, among the many mistakes of this movie, the biggest was actually the end credits. Not the mid and post credit scenes, those were ok, but the credits themselves. A montage of pictures from the first two Guardians movies served only to highlight how much better the first movie was.

Yeah, I didn't like it. I think I've said before that the MCU movies are now suffering under the weight of the MCU. This one certainly does.