The Learning Curve Movie

Rating: 6/10 (1 May 2017)

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 is the sequel to the highly successful surprise hit of 2014 and damn, you gotta give James Gunn credit for that movie. It's hilarious and he managed to get a group of characters to the point where you understood the motivations of all of them, but they also managed to function as a very cool team.
You would think with Vol. 2 that now it's the easy part. They'll go on a mission together, the sarcastic ones will tell some jokes, we'll get to know a bit more about Gamora's dad Thanos, Peter will give us another Awesome Mix Tape, Baby Groot will say "I am Groot" over/under 500 times and there you go.
But while we can see snippets of the characters we loved so much in the first film, this movie is strange. Like there's no real plot to speak of but I don't think I was even able to realize that til about an hour in. It's very involved. Like most second movies it's trying to figure out where it should go from here, just not always successful.
Basically the Guardians have been lending their services out around the Galaxy, then Kurt Russell turns up as Peter's dad and he turns out to be a celestial planet whose been built into bio-form. So we'll get some bonding over harnessing Cosmos and classic rock, but never with the amount of feeling you might expect.
While Peter, Gamora, and Drax hang out on Planet Daddy, B-Groot and Rocket are in a pickle with Yondu and have to help him. So the group is separated from most of the movie and I felt it ate into some of the comedy.
There are other subplots like a will they or won't they romance between Peter and Gamora (which, you won't care), there's one about the Guardians pissing off the head of some Sovereign race (you can tell they're Sovereign cause they're done up like Oscars) and they keep coming back for a fight, Stallone also shows up in another.
Nebulla is brought in too because Gamora also needs some kind of family drama to deal with while Peter deals with his. I actually thought Nebulla would be the villain here but it appears Marvel has fixed it's villain problem.by keeping the villain a secret til the last half hour. He's still bent on world destruction though.
But listen- all of this really does come off like Gunn is just trying to keep 10 plates spinning at once but it's not really bad so much as it's just hard to hang on to for long. There is still some fantastic stuff here and for every joke about Cheers or David Hasselhoff that seems played out, there are others that work excellently.
Drax doesn't get much to do plot-wise but Bautista couldn't do a better job of playing him. Drax is a lunatic, that big laugh just makes him more of a lunatic, and when he does a joke or a prank with a straight face; he is comedy gold. Rocket also brings the sarcasm, B-Groot is cute.
The action is also as cartoon-like over-the-top as it was in the first film, and Gunn gives us a humdinger of an ending battle sequence. His effects work here is like the best acid trip you've ever been on and he really does have a gift for attaching music to all this.
So overall, if you loved the first movie, you'll like this one. But this is a movie that's going to be overrated before people even see it. Some will expect more, some will just overblown the whole thing cause they love these characters. I think as we look back on it, it will be the movie in the series we'll all call fine but that was definitely a learning curve.
I go 6.5 out of 10. If you guys liked this, be sure to check me out on Youtube for more.