Not as good as the original, but still very fun

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2017)

It's next to impossible to make a better film than the original Guardians of the Galaxy. You have start with no expectations going in, and when you do get sucked into the world, you end up loving the characters and laughing at every line. Everything comes together perfectly to make an incredibly fun movie, and one of my personal favorite films of all time. So naturally I, along with many others I'm sure, was excited for the eventual sequel. Watching it... it's good, but not better than the original.
The characters are still hilarious (save for maybe Baby Groot... we'll talk about him later). The action is still super fun to watch (save for the first scene... again, later). And the soundtrack is debate-ably better than the original. Debate-ably. Personally I prefer the original, as I still have some of those songs stuck in my head to this day. When new characters are added, such as Peter (Chris Pratt, one of the best actors ever)'s dad (played by Kurt Russell) and Mantis (I'M UGLY AND I'M PROUD!), they have great chemistry with the main cast. More backstory is given to Peter, as well as reasons why Nebula is mostly machine and bad makeup... sorry, it's more obvious the more you look at it. The best part of all of this new stuff is that it doesn't fall flat on it's face and continues to make sense in terms of lore and faithfulness to the comic book.
Speaking of new characters, we got about 5. Mantis (please make a meme with her face over Spongebob going "I'm ugly and I'm proud!" and Drax being Patrick), Ego (the obvious bad-guy), Sylvester Stallone (he has a name but I just refer to him as Sylvester Stallone) as the Leader of the Ravagers, a new friend of Yondu's, and Baby Groot. I hate Baby Groot and the opening scene. Everyone else is great. So for Baby Groot they tried the whole "cute character" stick and suddenly I lost a lot of respect for the character that was given two extra words to show incredible character development. The opening scene is that of the Guardians of the Galaxy fighting a rainbow-fire-breathing space kracken. You know, the one that was in the majority of trailers? Well screw you! Let's show a spinning shot of Baby Groot dancing to some admittedly good music! It ruins the scene that was built up in every trailer. Do you want to see the most amazing thing ever? The one thing we're sure you walked into the theater to see? Screw you! Here's a 2 inch tall tree dancing! Why would you ruin that? Every other action scene is classic Guardians fun however, so I can forgive it somewhat. Like that one scene with Yondu and Rocket shooting/magic-arrowing up the Ravager base, that practically made up for all of it.
Ego turns out to be the obvious bad-guy, and we get to another weird thing about this film; it's surprisingly adult. And not in themes, I mean there's a lot of adult humor and somewhat disturbing imagery. Hundreds of skeletons of children, weird sexual humor, Ego without skin and muscle... weird sexual humor... Earth getting blobbed... weird sexual humor... There's a lot of sexual humor in this one. It's weird because the first one didn't have any. At least, none that I can remember.
Overall it's a good film. It was never going to top the original, but that's totally fine, because the first one is something special. I'll definitely continue to rewatch not only that film, but when this one eventually comes out on Starz, I'll certainly rewatch this. Go watch it and see for yourself.