Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Our Review

The daddy issue movie. Where the first Guardians was a discovery, Volume 2 is a victory lap that knows it has an audience and tests how much shtick that audience will absorb. Kurt Russell arrives as Ego, a living planet wearing Peter Quill’s father’s face, and the film builds its whole emotional architecture on the oldest story in the series: the dad who seems wonderful and is actually the villain.

The opener sets the tone, a monstrous battle rendered in the background while Baby Groot dances to ELO in the foreground, and the movie keeps choosing character comedy over plot for its whole first half. It is funnier, sadder, and more self indulgent than the original, sometimes in the same scene. The jokes about the team’s bickering occasionally overstay, and the gold skinned Sovereign are a thin antagonist made watchable by Elizabeth Debicki’s icy delivery.

The heart belongs to Michael Rooker’s Yondu. The ravager captain’s arc, from disgraced joke to the best father in the franchise, builds to a funeral scene set to Cat Stevens that lands harder than anything else in the Marvel canon that decade. “He may have been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy” is the line people quote, and it earns it.

Our score: 7/10. Messier than the first, braver too.