Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (some spoilers)

The third and apparently final of James Gunn’s Marvel series reveals the underlying question of the series: what (or who) makes a good dad? The daddy issues of the series have never been subtle with Volume 1 featuring the truly appalling dad of both Gamora and Nebula in the form of Thanos. The purple Titan did not meet his ultimate fate until the Marvel Endgame crossover but in between time, we met Peter Quill’s dad, Ego the Living Planet. Given that ego took the physical form of veteran space-dad Kurt Russell, he looked like a better proposition than genocidal Thanos. Alas, Ego was also a mass murderer. A surprise last minute contender for best dad came in the form of Yondu, the Ravager who kidnapped/adopted Peter but while vastly better than either Thanos or Ego, he’s still not a great dad.

So volume 3 takes on to the next Guardian’s dad issues. In this case not Rocket Racoon’s literal dad but rather his creator. This turns out to be The High Evolutionary who I suspect will easily win Cora’s annual horrible fictional parent award. Played by Chukwudi Iwuji (recently seen in Gunn’s Peacemaker series) he is the epitome of an abusive person.

We see in flashback Rocket’s origins and the film pulls no punches. It is tough emotional stuff with animal experimentation and gut-punching emotional tragedy. It made me cry. There is a cynicism to it, like a lot of Gunn’s work. He knows what he’s doing and the science-fictional setting means he’s not really making any sort of point about animal experimentation or even emotional abuse. Yet, he really does know what he’s doing and he manages to pull off this darker material along with the usual jokes, musical numbers and space action sequences.

Beyond Rocket’s story, the film carries on in the technicolour Guardians’ way with the usual excellent performance by the cast. The new addition is Will Poulter as a surprising but effective Adam Warlock who plays this initial version of the character with some of the vibes of Anthony Starr’s Homelander from The Boys.

The film does find a way to a final answer to the question of who is a good dad. It is a surprising but inevitable answer that you can work out by a process of elimination given the various surrogate dads of several Guardians are accounted for and they are all absolutely appalling. It’s a good answer.

Finish with a song and dance which takes the soundtrack to the 2000’s, dry your eyes and overall, a pretty good film.