Just can't stop the music, but you'll wish that you could

Rating: 5/10 (4 May 2017)

The Guardian's of the Glaxy is a film so in love with its own cuteness that it forgets that the audience might want something more than laughing along with a CGI tree stump dancing across the Guardian's opening battle with a big pink monster.
I welcomed the first movie as new space opera to stand along the Star Wars and star Trek universes but the focus of Vol2 is on character relationships and another Hollywood take on men with Daddy issues. Chris Platt's Star-lord is troubled because he never knew his father, who exists in his memory as a David Hasslehoff look-a-likee. These feelings of loss run so deep that they are given one line of dialogue in which they are established.
Cue the arrival of Kurt Russel as 'Ego' Star-Lord's biological dad. Comic book fans will recognize the name from 'Thor' where Ego, as here, is a living planet no less and one of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's cosmic 'God figures'. Needless to say, the family reunion doesn't go as planned.
I desperately needed to take a leak after scoffing a large piece of coffee cake (oh the joys of diabetes) and chose the films climactic battle to leave the room. I didn't feel I missed much. By then, the film had undercut any involvement by relentlessly using bathetic humour to undermine almost every scene.
The script feels afraid that the audience will lose interest in the film if it isn't laughing at itself. This becomes a weird self-fulfilling prophecy. Post the God versus Guardians punch up, we are suddenly asked to engage with the profound revelation that it doesn't matter who your biological dad is, your real father is the man who brought you up (in this case Yondu, the blue finned gang boss who took a paternal if not exactly unselfish interest in Star-Lord and taught him in the ways of ravaging). Now, I am adopted and have met my birth father so I should have been moved by this. I wasn't. Because it was too much to ask me to engage in any depth with characters who had only been taken seriously as straight guys setting up quips, put downs and jokes.
The sister-act between Gamorah and her angry sibling Nebula would fare better than the Peter Quill/Ego conflict because at least the two women are treated seriously. However, audiences forgive me, I couldn't remember who the heck Nebula was or what role she played in the last movie. A quick scan of Nebula's comic book history reveals that I have managed to miss her appearances in the comics. That at least explains why my mind kept confusing her name with Nebulon, 'the celestial man' (sic) another cosmic character. Except that, stop the boat, the film may play with this confusion too because the star beast the Guardian's fight at Vol 2's opening looks a bit like the non-human form of Nebulon â€“ go image search it.
The wider conflict is between a race of haughty golden people called the Sovereign race who are first helped then scammed by The Guardians â€“ well by Rocket Racoon actually, who takes offense at their upper crust ways and snobbish attitude. Cue a space battle played out as an arcade game, a joke that wears thin even as it is being told, but in case you missed the gag the film tells it again.
But never mind the plot what about the music? A consideration deemed so important to the film that Marvel's plot outline here promotes it to the first line of its synopsis. Sure, this collection of big, bold but ultimately banal songs helps while away the time and helped me forget the film is only ever moments away from slipping to just the wrong side of terrible (THAT terrible side being the god awful Star Trek V (pun intended). But this is no Tarantino movie sound track. In his films, the music sets up all sorts of frissons. Here, the pop tunes just make the ride pass easier exactly like a tape mix in a car's cassette player (does anyone remember Eight Track?).
If, after the next Avengers movie, there is a Guardians Vol 3 I can only hope that it takes time to developing its wider fictional universe and has the courage to take that universe a little more seriously- by that I mean respectfully. One of the five in-credit sequences reveals a cocoon containing Adam Warlock, one of my all- time favorite characters, and I want a better world for him to be born into.