Fun, but the magic of the first movie has gone

Rating: 6/10 (29 April 2017)

The first Guardians movie was fantastic, it made me laugh more than just about any other and I simply love that movie. This movie felt completely different, the movie makers were trying too hard and the magic slipped through their fingers. The first movie had an easy charm, it worked because it was fresh, original and they nailed the characters. Here they laid on the family-relationships stuff way too thick. It was not so much a comedy as a soap opera with corny lines. The chemistry between the lead couple was gone. And who cared about the sisters' squabbles? All of this felt laboured. Family this, family that, it felt as if we were being emotionally manipulated rather than entertained. Even Rocket was dragged into this over-egged family theme. The villain (SPOILER) didn't seem evil, rather, just a lonely, sad old God. The movie made us really like him and then tried to get us to hate him. It didn't work. Stallone made an unwelcome appearance, he snapped me out of the movie. The first movie worked precisely because it didn't feel like a Hollywood movie, as opposed to "Expendables" nonsense of trying-to-be-cool-with-the-youth comedy stuff. This movie, Guardians 2, started great but ended horribly, with criminals making a firework display, complete with bangs in space. And some flaky skits in the credits. The first movie was so funny, for me at least, largely because of Rocket, a genius comic creation. But here Rocket was sidelined, in favour of all the soppy soap stuff. And his comedy in this movie seemed a bit forced. The "Taserface" joke wasn't funny. The villain may have been called Ego, but Ego could have been the name of this entire movie. On the other hand, the opening credits and fight with the octopus fish monster were hilarious, (though I wanted to see more of the out-of-focus monster, and not the dancing plant, but that was part of the clever joke) but after that, the laughs were few and far apart, and as for the cheese: "He was your father but not your daddy" Eh? With the resources spend on this movie, they could have tightened it up, ditched the pointless sisters side plot - and coming to think of it - the lame metrosexual gold-people plot - and added in comedy in the style of the first movie, and stopped trying to press all the emotional buttons all the time, hell, one of the characters actually did that literally, in a manner of speaking, with her antenna.