James Gunn Will Never Log Off

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is Marvel's best movie in at least five years -- and then it drags on for another 40 minutes.

Disney/Marvel

James Gunn, who directs the third of his Guardians of the Galaxy movies and his final movie for Marvel before he goes off to become co-CEO of DC Studios, is bursting with great ideas. But he keeps rambling for so long after he’s already made his point in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 that you forget what the point was and eventually wish he would just shut up. It’s especially infuriating because Gunn in particular seems better at this than anyone.

Vol. 3 feels refreshingly un-Marvel for a good chunk of its runtime, but in the end it can’t escape that worst tendency of Marvel movies — towards mawkish self-sentimentality. The MCU is consistently the only franchise that seems to seek not just to be enjoyed, but to be congratulated for existing. To paraphrase Don Draper, THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!

Where Endgame had an overlong ending sequence with all the actors signing their names on the screen (a deliberate attempt to blur the lines between moviegoing and souveniring?) Vol. 3 has (and I don’t really consider this a spoiler, you’ll just have to trust me on this one) a scene in which all the characters basically hold hands and sing along to Florence and the Machine. Wake up, piggies! The slop has gone rancid!

The worst thing about it is that Vol. 3 really felt like something special for a while. There have been two key problems with Marvel movies for at least the last five or 10 years — the inexorable stakes escalations, where the heroes have to save the world, then the galaxy, then the universe, then the multi-verse, and eventually the fabric of reality itself — and the constant commercial demand of ever greater tie-ins. One could make a case that the latter demand (to keep introducing more and more characters and somehow make them share space in the same movie) is the biggest influence on the former condition, but in either case, Gunn seems to have solved both problems in Vol. 3. It includes no characters outside the Galaxy-verse (other than a spare reference or two to Thanos) and the plot essentially comes down to one man’s attempt to save his dying raccoon friend.

That’s cute in a canny way, Gunn’s specialty, and refreshingly straightforward for a Marvel movie. Vol. 3 makes a direct appeal to basic emotion (what kid hasn’t lost a pet?), where so many of these things only appeal to continuity and our inherent need for completeness. There are times throughout the first almost two hours of Vol. 3 that Gunn seems like the best and maybe only guy who should be directing these things. Guardians has traditionally been the only sub-franchise that Marvel allows to be a little weird, and not just busy or “funny” at its own expense.

Gunn is a former Troma filmmaker with a naturally scat sense of humor and a flair for goo and gore that make him ideal for a milieu that often struggles with anodyne characters and scaled-beyond-all-fuck action sequence that look like videogame characters pinging against each other in front of screensaver backgrounds. You rarely get that with Gunn, who can be genuinely funny where a lot of Marvel filmmakers often offer only a simulacra of it, and fascinated with all things visceral, if not viscous. He’s probably spent more time discussing renderings of various forms of mucous with his VFX team than Chris Pratt has spent on set total.

In Vol. 3’s first big action sequence, Peter Quill (Pratt) and his team have to infiltrate a massive corporate biolab facility in order to steal the code to a “kill switch” inside Rocket Raccoon’s body (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Think Blade Runner meets Crank. In a truly inspired conceit, we learn that the facility itself has been “grown from organic matter” and getting inside involves slicing open the lab’s “skin” like they’re draining a boil and slithering inside through the pus hole. It’s hard to overstate how genuinely delightful this entire sequence is, exuberantly rendered and in service of a heartfelt story.

Once inside, the facility feels like Terry Gilliam meets The Fifth Element, where the lead idiot hench-dude played by Nathan Fillion (who feels like a nerd in-joke made flesh at this point) wears some kind of massive, coral-colored body suit shaped like bodybuilder muscles with weaponry embedded in the forearms. It’s all garishly colored and maximalist in scale, neon weapons of war inside a set you imagine a flamboyantly gay version of Gwar designing. Any second you expect Ruby Rhod might pop out of the wall.

If you know anything about my tastes, you know that’s a high compliment, and at his best Gunn makes you feel like he made a movie just for you. I’ve heard rumors that a lot of “directors” Marvel hires don’t actually do much on their films, working with actors on the sets of action sequences planned out long before they were hired, but Gunn’s stamp seems to be all over this thing.

Gunn intercuts these quests to fix Rocket with flashbacks to Rocket’s kit-hood (raccoon babies are called “kits,” I had to look that up), during which a messianic biotech God wannabe called “The High Evolutionary” (played with maniacal aplomb by Chukwudi Iwuji, who seems like he’s having at least as much fun as Gary Oldman was in The Fifth Element and crushes it from start to finish) does painful experiments on him in an attempt to create a utopian society. Locked away in a dark cell for most of his existence, Rocket befriends his fellow experimentees — an empathetic river otter with robot arms, a rabbit with metal spider claws and malfunctioning language center, and a bashful walrus with his eyes sewed open, A Clockwork Orange-style. I didn’t get to bring my 10-year-old stepson to this screening, but there were definitely a few times I wondered whether this would’ve been too intense for him (they also throw in one or two uses of “fuck” and “shit,” which I never understand at all, either go full R or don’t bother).

Disney/Marvel

These misfit toys form an indelible bond, like Island of Dr. Moreau meets The Secret of NIMH, setting the stage for a big betrayal and providing context for Rocket’s later misanthropy. As someone perhaps overly inclined to empathize with small furry creatures, this entire plotline hit me right in the squishy center.

Yet with Gunn there’s always this whipsaw between feeling like he knows exactly what he’s doing and wondering if he’s just pathologically regurgitating pop culture references, some of which inevitably land. Just like I didn’t need Steve Agee shouting “it’s a freakin’ kaiju!” in Suicide Squad, I don’t need Peter Quill calling the High Evolutionary “a Robocop-looking mother[*sound effect drowns out swear word*].” These references land better when the characters don’t just scream them aloud.

Likewise, there’s a brilliantly rendered, slow-mo and speed-ramped fight scene near the end that’s so obviously inspired that you wonder why so many of the other ones feel like lazy collections of close-up quick cuts. Maybe they ran out of time? I don’t know.

But no logistical obstacle can excuse Vol. 3’s unnecessary, interminable series of false endings and superfluous epilogues that make Return Of The King seem restrained by comparison. We had a great ending with Quill and Rocket and the necessity of compassion and friendship! But Gunn can’t be satisfied with it. He’s pathologically incapable of just LETTING THIS MOVIE END. It’s like he’s staging his own elaborate going away party, refusing to relinquish the stage until he’s received a properly embellished show of gratitude from the audience. Or maybe that’s too mean, maybe he just has endless ideas and no edit button.

Either way, someone on this massive production should’ve been the adult in the room. To try to convey what Vol. 3’s nightmarishly belabored ending is like without spoiling it, I had to search for an obscure and very old video that someone made, recutting the ending of American Pie 2 to extend the closing montage sequence to absurd lengths (huge thanks to @theredpwny on twitter for helping me find this).

This is exactly what the last 40 minutes of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 are like! Your favorite characters cheersing and recheersing each other for all infinity while a popular song plays, as if emotional investment was tied to run time. James Gunn, I am begging you to log off.