Guardians Of The Galaxy

There's a danger that in a genre as lousy as superhero movies, anything which is not completely dreadful will be hailed as some kind of masterpiece, which is what I think has happened with Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a halfway decent, fairly amusing piece of lightweight entertainment which is somewhat better than a dozen of its more serious-minded and heavy-handed predecessors.

Based on a Marvel comic (isn't everything?), this story offers us an ill-assorted team of humans and non-human beings, who join forces to fight against the bad guys. Yes, that is the plot. What did you expect? War & Peace? 

Reading from right to left, we have Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), the human face, and manly hero of the crew; Gamora (Zoe Saldana) who is from another planet, but is still recognisably hot (in movie terms, you understand); Drax (Dave Bautista), also not of this world, with a bodybuilder's build, and a lack of facility with words; Rocket (Bradley Cooper), a kind of mutant raccoon who never stops taking; and Groot (Vin Diesel) who makes Drax look positively fluent, since he has a sum total of 3 words – "I am Groot," to be precise.

Like all movie teams, they wind up together despite themselves, and continue squabbling and bickering until they finally find that they are stronger together than they are separately, and that collective action can overcome evil – and all that socialist stuff that somehow gets lost in the real world. If only Hollywood practised what it preached.

As I say, the plot is tissue paper-thin, and of no interest or consequence; the special effects are of the sort you would expect when vast sums of money are being thrown at a film; and the only slight deviation from the norm is an excess of what passes for humour in superhero films – in other words, taking the piss out of the genre.

I enjoyed it enough not to mind sitting through it for 2 hours, but I couldn't recommend it to anyone except those who are a) bored, b) not very bright or c) easily amused. I still prefer Iron Man 3. Now that's what I call funny.

5/10

Phil Raby 

Front Row Films 

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