VSThings are bad for superheroes in Hollywood. Whether they came out of the DC or Marvel factories, the genre’s last four productions either failed to blast the box office as much as expected – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever And Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania –or totally failed their career – see the bitter failures of black adam and especially of Shazam! The Rage of the Gods.
Professional reviews, mixed at best, have accompanied this beginning of public disenchantment for several months, the result of the filthy inability of the studios to understand a truth that is however simple like the S in Superman: by dint of repeating the same damaged recipes without true leader in the realization, the superheroic genre exposes itself to a prohibitive collective indigestion.
Too many lousy CGIs, too many silly and convoluted scripts, too many multiverses, too many pre-chewed action scenes coming out of the same computer programs, too much fan service calibrated for social networks, too much self-satisfied length – the 2 hours 30 are now the norm…
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Jostled in its routine by the pandemic parenthesis, the genre is dying of its own mediocrity, of its own artistic cowardice and is heading straight for a well-deserved impasse. Very big franchises to come – such as the expected reboots of Fantastic Four and X-Men at Marvel, Superman Legacy at DC… – will necessarily continue to create the event, but if the films in question turn out to be, once again, only blisters without soul or roughness, the masked vigilantes will sooner or later be shunned even by their most faithful.
Antispecism à la Brigitte Bardot
In this greyish weather, the exit of the Guardians of the Galaxy 3 acts as a thinning because of the good image of the franchise and its singular director James Gunn. After the bitter potions mentioned above, the team of punk and milk soup space warriors seems expected as the miracle spice to revive the appetite of the crowds.
In fact, the first post-press screening returns are lost in superlatives. “The best Marvel movie since avengers endgame », « the return of the great MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe, NDLR] “, “a spectacular and moving conclusion”, we read here and there on the Web for a few days.
Unfortunately, we do not share the overflowing enthusiasm of those who desperately want to believe it. 32e Marvel Studios feature film does offer some goodness as well as a handful of interesting takes for anyone wanting to explore Gunn’s psyche. But even if it gravitates a few cables above the ordinary, the film suffers from a flagrant lack of finesse and strikes us, with blows of a club, emotional processes bordering on an anti-speciesism that Aymeric would not deny Caron or Brigitte Bardot.
The Traumatic Origins of the Hairy Mammal
The center of the plot is the talking raccoon Rocket (embodied in VO by Bradley Cooper). This third part delves into the heart of the traumatic origins of the hairy mammal, touched upon in brief allusions in the previous opuses.
While the Guardians enjoy a well-deserved rest in their space HQ of Knowhere and their leader Peter Quill drowns in alcohol the sorrow of a lost love, the ambient tranquility is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), emissary of the Master of Evolution (Chukwudi Iwuji), in charge of kidnapping Rocket.
Created downstream of sinister genetic experiments, the latter is tracked by his ex-torturer, who seeks to extract from his brain a crucial element to perfect his obsession with a eugenic human-animal society. Warlock is defeated by the Guardians, but Rocket was seriously injured in the attack. His salvation goes through the search for his tragic origins, ignored until now by his companions.
Taste for provocation
Film more angry and bitter than the first two parts, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 can be read as a self-analysis by proxy of James Gunn, a director with a brutalized childhood who has never hidden his identification with the character of Rocket. The intelligent animal, forever traumatized by the unspeakable mistreatment inflicted by the Master of Evolution, has always camouflaged his ill-being under an inky humor and an ostentatious asociability.
The main common thread here is to follow Rocket’s final fight against his own demons and his affirmation as an individual freed from a heavy past. Gunn, by his own admission, went through a similar trajectory and, before filming, also had to deal with the immense humiliation of his (temporary) dismissal in 2018 by Disney and Marvel following the unearthing of old tweets at the scabrous humor.
Reassured by his rehiring as head of Guardians of the Galaxy 3Gunn took, beforehand, the time to realize the excellent The Suicide Squad for competitor DC/Warner. A film bearing the marks of its author’s taste for provocation, a certain visual surrealism and the cracked antiheroes of the helmet.
A genetically tampered rabbit, walrus and otter
Guardians of the Galaxy 3, written by Gunn as the sole screenwriter, therefore has the merit of being read as a roadmap of the director’s own evolution in the light of his past and recent trials. Other good ideas run through the script, such as the treatment of the new relationship between Gamora and Quill, the gradual humanization of Nebula (Karen Gillan) and the delicate succession of the late Yondu ensured by his lieutenant Kraglin (Sean Gunn, brother of James ).
Almost each character is thus entitled to his personal itinerary between the beginning and the end of the story: these days in American blockbusters, this is not a luxury. Fans of the universe’s gooey, multicolored aesthetic Guardians will also be at the party, as James Gunn has a field day with regressive viscous textures in the Orgoscope complex (HQ of Orgocorp, the cosmic laboratory for genetic manipulation), imagined as a concentrate of living tissue. Bravo for the imagination but on the screen, the result will come back for elegance.
The biggest pitfall of this third vintage remains above all the heaviness with which it throws its emotional claims in the face of the spectator. Flashbacks to Rocket’s ordeal are stabilized by John Murphy’s pompous, operatic score, overloaded with choirs and hysterical violins. In these flashbacks, Rocket’s cellmates – a genetically-tweaked rabbit, walrus, and otter – cause more embarrassment than sympathy, while their future fate follows unsurprising logic.
Bigoted detour through purgatory
At the end of a laborious framework based on the key to be found to cure the raccoon then switching to a collective rescue at the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomthe film tumbles into a right-thinking summoning a famous biblical imagery.
Twice, Gunn also unsheathes the dramatic weapon of fake death, with a bigoted detour through the most hackneyed purgatory in one of the two cases: here again, the thickness of the line spoils the scene. We will also look, in vain, in the staging, for the freshness and the punch that hit the mark in The Suicide Squad. Let’s not even talk about the calamitous treatment of Adam Warlock, a cult character in the Marvel universe here reduced to the rank of immature jester embodied by the chubby and ill-chosen Will Poulter.
Despite all his good intentions and the sincerity of James Gunn, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 therefore hardly exceeds the stage of the spectacle at the end of the course, abusing coarse tear effects until an end which also manages to miss its shot when, on paper, it had everything to break our hearts.
Abusing shredded vintage tubes (we can’t take it anymore creepy from Radiohead and the Since You’ve Been Gone of Rainbow, James!) and slow motions on the wandering heroes as in The Wild Horde, the film is rambling and it is not the few hilarious jokes that our space pirates always send each other tit for tat (the funniest of which remains the colossus Drax) that are enough to oxygenate a breathless formula. All this breathed new in 2014 but, in 2023, the Guardians of the Galaxy smell rather musty. It really is time to take time off.
“Guardians of the Galaxy. Volume 3 »by James Gunn, with Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista…, 2:30 a.m., in theaters May 3.