Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ on VOD, Where James Gunn’s Vision Stands Out Among the Marvel Muck

The Marvel Cinematic Universe somewhat desperately needed a creative success, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) is mostly it. Mostly. After the grating annoyance of Thor: Love and Thunder, the passable but disappointing Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the ungainly CGI onslaught of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, GOTG3 arrived to deliver more of the goofy emo charm writer-director James Gunn cultivated in the first two misfits-in-space adventures (notably, it’s Gunn’s last MCU go-round before committing himself full time to running DC Studios). Of course, it clocks in at two-and-a-half hours, because what is an MCU movie if it isn’t trying our patience at least a little bit. But it does pretty much function as its own narrative, and is more than just the 32nd movie in an endless ultrafranchise that’s starting to huff and puff as popular cinema’s pacesetter. In other words, it’s the chunk of MCU content most worthy of our attention since Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness debuted a year ago – please note how both films are helmed by the MCU’s most “visionary” directors – and if that’s not really Saying Something, well, it’s also not just Saying Nothing either.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The first thing we see: a batch of adorable little raccoons squirming here and there adorably, until a cruel hand reaches into the cage. Then we cut away. An acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep” plays, minus the F-bombs. So much for hitting the ground running, eh? More like hitting the ground dragging your feet in a deep mope. Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper, motion-capture performance by Sean Gunn) has that glassy-eyed expression that makes us think he could cry at any moment. Quill (Chris Pratt) is drunk – again. He’s still not over the heartbreak of his girlfriend, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) dying and coming back as a past version of herself that’s indifferent to his big gloopy feelings. Nebula (Karen Gillan), Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) are helping Rocket kinda run things around here, “here” being Knowhere, a massive spaceship that’s also the decapitated head of a space god or something, and serves as the Guardians’ HQ. Kraglin (Sean Gunn) can’t quite get the hang of the thing where you whistle and make an arrow fly through the air and pierce bad guys to death, and he takes it out on Cosmo (Maria Bakalova), the Soviet dog with telekinetic powers, by traumatizing her: “Bad dog,” he says. What a jerk. 

Meanwhile, Groot (voice of Vin Diesel) is Groot. 

Now, what could possibly fall out of the sky to shake up our intrepid principals? That would be Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), an angry enemy of the Guardians and a very powerful member of the Sovereign race, who you’ll recall from earlier GOTGs as the annoying gold-skinned people. The Guardians fend him off, but not before he critically injures Rocket and triggers parallel plots: One is a flashback to Rocket’s origin, which explains the opening scene with the widdle baby-waby waccoons. He was the object of awful experiments that gave him his extraordinary intelligence, and found him locked in cages alongside other experimentees, most notably Lylla (voice of Linda Cardellini), a sweetheart of a talking otter with robot arms, who nurtures Rocket like a big sister. The perpetrator of these awful crimes is a bloviating and pretentious anusface known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji), whose idea of creating a utopian world consists of accelerating the evolutionary trajectories of animals, rendering them sentient and self-aware and all that, and murdering them when they don’t match his specifications. The only time he got it right? That’s Rocket. 

And that’s what brings us to the other plot, the one in the present day, where Quill, Nebula, new/old Gamora, Groot, Drax and Mantis race against time to save Rocket’s life. This involves tracking down the High Evolutionary for a thing with the info in it that’ll prevent their pal from croaking; it also allows this patience-testing villain-slash-spewer-of-exposition say things like, “There is no god! That’s why I stepped in!” While they embark on that epic journey – set, as ever, to the super sounds of the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and not quite now – the Rocket flashback plays out in such a manner that it takes our emotions and fastidiously disembowels them. There’s no getting through a Guardians movie without feeling some of all of the feels, you know.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: As far as having very few recognizable visual points of reference goes – there are no trees or condos or strip malls stacked with pizza joints, haircutteries and tax-prep offices in outer or inner space – GOTG3 absolutely obliterates the CG-overload worldbuilding mess that was Quantumania. And of all the smaller “series” within the greater MCU megaconglom, Gunn has created a truly distinctive style and tone that makes the Guardians movies stand out.

Performance Worth Watching: Although none of these plots is really about Nebula and Mantis, Gillan and Klementieff do quite a bit of heavy lifting here. And they’re – note that I use the following word without hesitation – great. Great! They consistently bullseye the sweet spot between funny and empathetic, and are the glue holding this rather unwieldy film together.  

Memorable Dialogue: Pick a goofy Drax line, any goofy Drax line – like, “Even my butt is capable of making an analogy.”

Sex and Skin: None. 

Our Take: The MCU is such a behemoth of a goliath of a juggernaut at this point, judging any of its films in any context outside of it feels like doing jiu jitsu with an octopus. For sheer big-screen spectacle, I’d rather watch a John Wick or Godzilla extravaganza than another furshlugginer Marvel movie, because the sheer volume of material, and the visual sameness of it, has drained a lot of the fun out of watching superheroes save the world/galaxy/universe/multiverse. What was once fresh has now faded, and the best of the current MCU doesn’t lie in its character and plot revelations or its propulsive overarching story, but in skilled filmmakers elbowing aside franchise baggage for long enough to indulge standout sequences – Raimi’s horror-comedy quirk in Multiverse of Madness, Ryan Coogler’s painterly imagery in Wakanda Forever and Dustin Daniel Cretton’s crackerjack fight sequences in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings are highlights poking through a whole lot of bric-a-brac.

Which brings us to Gunn’s work in GOTG3, which exhibits the director’s increasingly inspired approach to visual storytelling; he’s noticeably progressed since the first Guardians nine years ago. Narratively, he still courts bloat (a lengthy “humanimals” sequence set on “Counter-Earth” feels indulgent and unnecessary) and seems to construct sequences based on his beloved iPod playlists more than out of storytelling necessity (Spacehog’s “In the Meantime” all but derails the film at one point). But his CG effects are nearly Dawn of the Planet of the Apes-level amazing – you’d believe a talking walrus has a soul! – and his camera movement is unceasingly dynamic. He’s become a more confident and idiosyncratic director of action; a big crazy climactic “oner” of a fight sequence, set to the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” is an amusing, exhilarating collision of soundtrack and visual panache.

It’s Gunn’s heart that shines brightest, though. His characters squabble like family but function wholly out of love for each other, which is precisely the thing that cuts through all the seemingly Marvel-mandated rigamarole. His primary goal here is to elevate Rocket from goofball talking animal to a character of emotional complexity, and if his hand is sometimes heavy, he nevertheless succeeds at stirring up the potent bittersweetness of the traumatic story of a survivor. It’s Gunn saying, hey, if a weird little raccoon can make it through another day, so can you. If only more Marvel movies reached so deep.

Our Call: With the MCU nowadays, you take the bad with the good, and Guardians Vol. 3 has significantly more of the latter than the former. It also requires less MCU “continuity homework” than many recent entries. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.