- UK release: May 2023
- Director: James Gunn · Writer: James Gunn
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- Genre: Superhero space opera / found-family adventure · Runtime: 150 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Chris Pratt (Jurassic World) as Peter Quill / Star-Lord; Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook, A Star Is Born) as the voice of Rocket; Zoe Saldaña (Avatar, Star Trek) as Gamora; Dave Bautista (Blade Runner 2049, Dune) as Drax; Chukwudi Iwuji (Peacemaker) as the High Evolutionary
- IMDb: 7.9 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 81% critics / 96% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
James Gunn has spent nine years and three films turning a deliberately obscure corner of the Marvel catalogue into the warmest thing the studio makes, and Vol. 3 arrives as the closing chapter, the one he reportedly always knew he was building towards. It is also the one with the most to lose. The first Guardians surprised everyone by being funny and felt and set to a mixtape; the second leaned harder on sentiment and got a little pleased with itself. The risk now is a victory lap. What Gunn delivers instead is the bleakest and most affecting of the three, an adventure that keeps the jokes and the soundtrack but hangs the whole film on a grief it has earned the right to carry.
The setup
The Guardians have set up home on Knowhere, the hollowed-out skull they have turned into a ramshackle base, and they are not coping. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is drinking through the loss of the Gamora he loved, because the Gamora who survived is a version from another timeline with no memory of any of them. When an engineered super-being crashes onto Knowhere and leaves Rocket gravely hurt, the team has to break into the labs of the creature’s maker to save him, and that errand cracks open the question the films have always danced around: who built Rocket, and what was done to him to do it.
That backstory is the real engine of the film, told in flashback and parcelled out with care. I will keep the worst of it off the page, but be warned that this is the most upsetting material the franchise has touched, and the film does not flinch from it.
The cast
The ensemble has always been the draw, and the chemistry is still effortless. Pratt does his most muted work as Quill, the swagger drained out of him, and it suits the character to be the one holding the team together by his fingertips. Dave Bautista’s Drax has quietly become the soul of the group, his literal-mindedness now tender rather than only funny, and Karen Gillan’s Nebula gets the closest thing to an arc, the reformed hard case learning to lead. Zoe Saldaña has the trickiest job, playing a Gamora who is a stranger to everyone who loves her, and she keeps the prickliness honest rather than reaching for a reconciliation the script has not set up.
Bradley Cooper gives Rocket, again voiced entirely through performance, the heaviest lifting of his three appearances, and the film belongs to him. The real find is Chukwudi Iwuji as the High Evolutionary, a creator-villain consumed by the gap between the perfection he imagines and the creatures he keeps discarding. He plays it as wounded vanity rather than cackling menace, and he is genuinely frightening for it.
The craft
Gunn shoots this on the new generation of LED-wall virtual sets, and Henry Braham’s camera prowls through it with a restlessness the previous films did not have, including a corridor fight staged to look like a single unbroken take that is the best action Marvel has put on screen in years. The palette is louder and stranger than before, all oranges and acid greens, and the body-horror of the High Evolutionary’s experiments gives the design team something with real bite. The soundtrack, the series’ signature, swaps the seventies AM-radio nostalgia for a broader nineties and contemporary spread, and the needle drops still do the emotional work the dialogue trusts them to. At 150 minutes it is the longest of the three and you feel it in a saggy middle stretch, but the film buys that runtime back in a finale that actually moves.
How it stacks up
Set beside the first Guardians, this is a heavier, less weightless film, and that is the right call for an ending. The obvious companion is Gunn’s own The Suicide Squad, which shares the gallows humour, the affection for disposable misfits, and the willingness to be properly cruel to its characters; Vol. 3 is the more emotional of the two. Against the wider run of recent Marvel, where the films have started to feel assembled by committee, this stands out as the work of one person who plainly cares about these characters and is allowed to finish their story on his own terms. As a series closer it sits in the company of Toy Story 3 more than any superhero film: an ending about letting go that means it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are positive but slightly cooler than for the first film, parking it around 81% and calling it the weakest-reviewed of the three, with the usual grumbles about length and tonal whiplash. Audiences are having none of that reticence, sitting up at 96%, and on this one I am firmly with the crowd. The critical line treats the darkness and the comedy as a clash; in the cinema they read as the same film insisting that you can be daft and grief-stricken at once, which is true to life and rare in the genre.
Verdict
This is exactly the franchise entry I most enjoy: funny, rewatchable, properly designed, and unafraid to feel something real underneath the spectacle. It is not flawless. The middle drags, the plot is a straightforward rescue, and one or two of the gags are stretched. None of that survives the back half, which lands the emotional payoff three films have been setting up and gives this oddball band the send-off they deserve. I will happily watch it again, which for a 150-minute blockbuster is the test that matters. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, in standard, IMAX and 3D.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film closed Gunn’s trilogy just as he departed Marvel to run rival DC Studios, which lends the letting-go theme an extra resonance in hindsight. The cast made brief returns elsewhere in the Avengers run, but this remains the proper full stop on the Guardians as a unit. It is now on disc and digital and streams on Disney+.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, injury detail, threat, infrequent strong language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes of violence include laser gun fights, stabbings, slashings, characters being blasted by fantastical powers, and crunchy fistfights. There is occasional sight of blood - primarily from aliens - and a woman largely comprised of robotic parts contorting her broken limbs as she reforms. Another woman’s arm is broken during a fight.
Threat and horror: There are sustained scenes of threat during action sequences in which ships explode and people avoid falling debris. Sequences also include gun threat, and people being blasted or held by fantastical powers. There are occasional ‘jump scares’, including from monsters and aliens. Animals are transformed into humanoid creatures, and there are distressing scenes of animals being experimented and operated on, leaving them as robotic-animal hybrids.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’) and milder terms including ‘asshole’, ‘ass’, ‘dick’, ‘dickhead’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘douche’, ‘God’, ‘hell’, ‘frickin”, ‘freaking’, ‘screw’, ‘damn’, ‘butt’ and ‘jerk’.
Injury detail: Characters sustain various injuries, including sight of blood, burn wounds and a man’s disfigured face after he has been mauled. A person is reduced to a charred corpse after being blasted by fantastical energy.
Sex: There are moments of innuendo around ‘touching’ someone, and oblique references to promiscuity.
Drugs: Aliens are briefly seen dealing an unnamed drug. Later, a man refers to dealing ‘meth’ in a clearly condemnatory manner.
Rude humour: A man makes a comic reference to the shape of his defecation.
Alcohol and smoking: A man appears drunk, and there are references to it being a pattern of behaviour.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
