Not quite the hype

Rating: 6/10 (28 October 2014)

I had high hopes for this movie, not knowing much about this lesser known comic series, and hearing all the early reviews.
I will say, it's squarely aimed at younger teens. The humor, while there, isn't very witty and rather obvious, stuff that would have made me chuckle when I was a little kid, but now? No. This was disappointing as most of the other Marvel films often had a lot of clever adult wit to them. The plot is also very basic, and just isn't very inventive.
The action is all very PG-rated stuff too. Much as there was all sorts of things going on, you weren't worried about any of the characters at all, nor in how the story would turn out.
Groot turns out to be ridiculously overpowering and he eliminates a lot of the perceived danger to the other characters. He quite literally smashes something like 30 guys all at once.
The main villain is as cardboard as you can get. I can't even remember his name, or what his motives were. He was just like the bad guy from THOR Dark World. Just kinda 'there', with another big scary looking ship.
Rocket Racoon, while expertly crafted in CGI, his voice acting was just terrible. In fact, everything about him was very wooden. I had thought that a Racoon whose been experimented on with cybernetics and such and with a penchant for heavy caliber weapons and street slang would be funny, but its obvious that his character is just trying too hard to BE that diminutive overachiever... His dialog really needed a better voice actor who sounded more like the character should, and with some sharper lines....
I just don't know with this movie. It just doesn't rank very well compared to most of Marvel's other outings. It has all the splash and dash 'appearance' of those films, but lacked the adult angle that the others have had. The last thing I expected was such a child oriented film. I guess the good news is, I can show this to my son a lot earlier than the other films due to their content.