Rumours of Marvel's imminent death have – for now, at least – been greatly exaggerated.
After a string of lacklustre releases, from The Eternals to Thor: Love and Thunder, and the relative box-office underperformance of Ant-Man and the Wasp, more than a few pundits have been suggesting that the studio's multiplex-engulfing bubble might be about to burst.
All of which makes the entertaining, surprisingly soulful and sometimes very weird Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 a pleasant gear shift, though it's one that comes at a bittersweet price for the MCU – the series' reigning creative force, writer-director James Gunn, has since switched teams to head up the rival DC universe at Warner Bros. His presence will be sorely missed.
Gunn's third go round at Marvel's once scrappy, B-list property might be his best, serving as a rousing reminder of how much these franchises can succeed in the right hands, claws, or tentacles – and just how much more enjoyable comic book movies tend to be when their superheroes cede the stage to misfits, monsters and aliens.
It's also an unabashedly emotional instalment, wearing its heart on its spandex sleeve in ways that its predecessors seemed to bury beneath their bluff and bluster. And the sentiment stems from the unlikeliest of places: the deep, dark origins of the cohort's most obnoxious member, the genetically engineered raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), whose traumatic backstory is one of sinister experimentation and animal cruelty.
When the film opens, the ill-tempered trash panda is moping around the Guardians' home base on Knowhere, mumbling along to an acoustic version of Radiohead's Creep – Jackson Maine would be proud – playing on the Microsoft Zune gifted to Peter Quill, aka Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), toward the end of the previous episode. (The series' signature 70s FM rock soundtrack has been augmented by a slew of 80s, 90s and 00s hits and banging deep cuts, thanks to this most anachronistic of portable device relics.)
Little does Rocket know that the mad scientist who created him, a gene-tampering tyrant known as the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, nailing the mix of megalomania and pathos), is on the hunt to retrieve genetic code contained in the furry critter's super brain. His Highness dispatches one of his many minions, jet-powered golden boy Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) to capture Rocket, resulting in a city-levelling brawl that leaves the raccoon on his deathbed, gasping for life.
To save him, Rocket's mercenary pals – Star-Lord, Drax (Dave Bautista), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) – set out on a mission to retrieve the passkey that will override his genetic kill switch, with the memory-impaired, alternate timeline Gamora (Zoe Saldaña) reluctantly tagging along for the ride.
Saldaña's newly mean green queen, who's been hanging out with Stakar Ogord's (Sylvester Stallone) Ravager crew since the events of Avengers: Endgame, has little patience for the Guardians' flip banter, and her gung-ho zest sparks some fiery exchanges with her ex, the now lovelorn, newly Flaming Lips-smitten Star-Lord.
Gunn gets all the ingredients just right this time: The comedy is genuinely funny rather than merely mean-spirited for its own sake, with the prior films' noisy, occasionally witless bickering elevated by looser, more idiosyncratic writing infused with big emotional stakes. (Not incidentally, the quota of eye-rolling 80s pop culture references has been dialled all the way down.)
True to the series' form, the film is filled with odd and distinctive design details, with spacecraft blasting through rainbow nebula vistas that would be at home in 70s fantasy sci-fi art, and all manner of gnarly life – think Star Wars spliced with Mœbius – sprawled out across the margins of the galaxy.
The first stop on the Guardians' rescue mission, the gooey HQ of a biotech bureaucracy known as Orgocorp, could have been designed by Willy Wonka if he'd passed through a space-time rip. A giant battle-craft fashioned to resemble a floating skull calls to mind the ominous head from 60s cult curio The Mask. And a trip to the High Evolutionary's Island of Dr Moreau-like alternate planet becomes a wonderful parody of suburban mob mentality – complete with a hilariously grotesque mockery of the Statue of Liberty – that might have sprung from the Twilight Zone.
Meanwhile, Rocket's origin tale travels to some twisted places, namely a dungeon populated with the High Evolutionary's discarded experiments: a fluffy white rabbit with mechanical spider legs, a walrus whose flippers have been replaced with truck wheels, and a robot-limbed otter – voiced, in the movie's most touching performance, by that once and forever freak and geek, Linda Cardellini – who seems to have crawled from Sid's Toy Story play chest.
Their story gives shape to the movie's emotional centre; one that's geared toward an empathy for all species, from misunderstood mutants to razor-toothed squid monsters to a telekinetic Soviet space dog (voiced with plucky charm by Borat's Maria Bakalova). Just as this backstory explains Rocket's abrasive personality, it reveals Gunn to be something of a big old softy – it's not for nothing that this is the least strenuously edgy of his movies, and all the better for it.
It's a film in which those on the genetic scrap heap might discover a sense of purpose and community – where the Guardians finally find their place as champions of entire species of maligned life. (I might have even teared up at a mutant animal beckoning its best friend toward the pearly gates; I am not made of stone.)
The movie's wayward bagginess – its willingness to indulge its many ideas, from the goofy to the macabre, across some two and a half hours – is also its strength. It's only when it adheres to the contours of the plot — the usual good-versus-evil battle as a villain's utopian aspirations turn to genocide — that it threatens to drag; but Gunn is clever enough to ensure we never lose sight of the world's comic-book strangeness.
There's always an overriding sense of the absurd, a playfulness that makes these kinds of movies fun – far from the brand-building chores they can too often resemble.
It's no surprise to find that what makes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 succeed is that, as with its successors, there's little deference paid to Marvel's overarching narrative strategy – a lone throwaway reference to The Snap is practically dismissive of the studio's grander-scale architecture (and might be read as a flip farewell from Gunn to his old stable).
The film's self-contained success, of course, represents a problem for Marvel, who with Gunn's departure are losing one of their most idiosyncratic and creative personalities – and with him, the possibility that a film like Guardians of the Galaxy might recur on their increasingly corporate slate.
It's certainly hard to imagine many future MCU properties signing off with The Replacements, or featuring a canine cosmonaut championing the discography of the Carpenters. Maybe Superman will take up the cause.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is in cinemas now.
