Guardians of the Galaxy Review

Nothing about this should have worked. The property was obscure even to comics readers, the cast included a talking tree with one line and a gun toting raccoon, and the studio had spent six years training audiences to expect self serious mythology. Gunn's answer was to make a hangout picture. The plot is the usual chase after a glowing object, and Ronan is the emptiest villain of the run, but the film keeps stopping to let these five insult each other, and that is where it lives.

Chris Pratt plays Quill as a man performing a coolness he has not got, Dave Bautista finds enormous comedy in taking every metaphor literally, and Bradley Cooper turns Rocket into a wounded animal the film refuses to sentimentalize until the exact moment it should. The Awesome Mix does real work rather than pasting nostalgia over the score, since every needle drop is a dead mother's handwriting. Ben Davis lights it in candy colors that look nothing like the rest of the house style. The finale collapses into a beam in the sky, as it must, but by then we are fond of them.