You know how Malcolm McDowell had his eyes clamped open in “A Clockwork Orange”? Imagine that’s you, and somebody’s spraying grape soda into your face while tickling your torso with peacock feathers and letting a litter of Dachsunds lick peanut butter off your toes. Welcome to “Guardians of the Galaxy 3,” the weirdest movie of 2023 (so far), which left me feeling like I spent 2.5 hours with defibrillators on my ulnar nerves.
The movie starts with its characters disoriented, as if recovering from a long illness, which makes sense because the last installment was pre-Covid. (“Wasn’t Kurt Russell the dad of Chris Pratt?” is all I remember from number two of the series, released in 2017 which in pandemic terms was 49 years ago.) We find Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Pratt) in a depressed, drunken stupor on Knowhere, a floating space city shaped like a severed head, which, surprisingly, isn’t close to being the most surreal aspect of the movie.
No sooner do we return to the bantering whimsy of purple he-man Drax, antennae-foreheaded empath Mantis, blue robo-alien Nebula, irritable Procyonidae Rocket Raccoon, and magical giant twig Groot, than they and their town are attacked by a blond-haired, flying creep named Adam Warlock (played by Will Poulter, whom you might remember as the prickly interactive programmer from “Bandersnatch” or the pinch-faced tree-pisser from “Midsommar”). At first Adam seems like a douchey Superman ala Homelander in the TV series “The Boys,” but it turns out he’s a Sovereign — that’s a golden-skinned race of engineered, ass-pulverizing assassins — and he’s following mysterious orders to destroy Rocket Raccoon.
I’m not much of a Marvel superhero fan, and “Guardians” often seemed the oddball cousin series to the entire endeavor anyway — something to take or leave as the comic series’s side hustle. My brain had to play confused catch-up as “Guardians 3” flies around like an octopus of over-pressurized garden hoses spurting glitter. Among other details, I’d forgotten that green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana) had died and was replaced by an alternate-universe version of herself, and I couldn’t tell you who her group, the Ravagers, are any more than I could tell you about polytheistic religious factions taming King Tut’s hippopotamus herds in Ancient Egypt, if such exist.
Soon our multi-colored, variously textured ensemble of unlikely heroes are rushing to save Raccoon’s life by dismantling a lurking kill-switch in his heart (in case you were nostalgic for Iron Man’s cardiac conundrum). At this point you realize that “Guardians 3” is finally going to answer the question most of us stopped asking: What exactly is Rocket Raccoon, and why does he insist he’s “not a raccoon”? (Would he prefer “trash panda”?)
The majority of “Guardians 3” then cross-edits between the Guardians’ phantasmagoric journey, and progressive flashbacks to when Rocket was a baby furball in a laboratory/prison of other genetic experiments by a villain named the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji, whose performance ranges from teeth-grittingly angry to veins-poppingly angry).
A big plus of the movie is that Peter Quill/Star Lord has been de-emphasized in favor of the ensemble. Pom Klementieff shines as Mantis, taking Jedi Mind Tricks to levels both useful and silly. As the burly Drax, Dave Bautista keeps his Zarg-nut snacking shtick fresh, emerging as a childlike wonder-dad who speaks alien kids’ language (literally and figuratively) and knows the right “boop”-ing absurdist playfulness to gain their trust. Performance-wise, Zoe Saldaña has completely switched gears, unleashing a coldly ferocious, screw-you version of her previous character.
Along the way, “Guardians 3” is so packed with off-kilter set design, freaky details, quirky side characters, and convention breaking that it feels like it’s indifferently flaunting its freedom. Writer/director James Gunn pauses at will so characters can organically riff, and runs with a thin “bad dog!” joke so confidently that the distinction between a weak joke and a strong one no longer matters.
Violent imagery shows characters relentlessly pummeled in the face, getting their heads twisted behind their backs, Groot mashed to twigs. One grotesque death reminded me of that scene in 1999’s “Mystery Men” when Greg Kinnear’s Captain Amazing is fried to a crisp. Elsewhere, “Guardians 3” lurches to extremes of cuteness, peaking with a stick-armed otter voiced charmingly by Linda Cardellini, and concluding with notes related to child refugees and animal rights. These tonal contradictions remind me of comedian Steven Wright’s joke about his parents putting him on a “mood swingset” that made him laugh and cry in rapid succession.
“Guardians 3” is easily the most aggressive, blowtorch-the-cobwebs, whip-the-dead-horse-with-a-fresh-whip attempt to shake off sequelitis since “Gremlins 2.” Even its outer-space aesthetic is iconoclastic, including a space station that’s less like Star Wars or Star Trek than David Cronenberg body horror. Channeling “Fantastic Voyage,” the Guardians laser-slice through what appear to be Brobdingnagian lower intestines, open door panels by dipping their hands into mucousy lemon pudding, then dodge guards who look like Stay-Puft Oompa-Loompa Michelin Men in a white-and-pink Roger Dean-style interior shopping mall from a nonexistent sequel to “The Fifth Element.” I wasn’t sure if this was a Marvel movie, or if Salvador Dali had been resurrected to redesign “Blade Runner” out of flower petals and milk. It’s like watching Pandora’s Box explode in a centipede-infested paint factory that’s double-billing a strobing Ewok rave and Cantina Band karaoke.
And that’s just the first half of the movie. Later we find our heroes on a mutant alternative earth full of 1950s subdivisions from “Edward Scissorhands” populated by the pig-faced “Island of Dr. Moreau” monsters cross-bred with surgeons in the “Eye of the Beholder” episode of the original “Twilight Zone.”
Inspired use of old-school/retro songs continues, with standout choices including Alice Cooper, The Flaming Lips, and “This Is the Day” by The The. A Beastie Boys cue was perhaps too reminiscent of how their song “Sabotage” was used in “Star Trek Beyond,” but I was pleasantly surprised to hear a character go full music-nerd talking up guitarist Adrian Belew. The filmmakers seem aware that the visual conceit of Star Lord roaming space with his Walkman as the Guardians walk forward in two-toned leather duds is best not overplayed, saving it as a grace note.
If “Guardians 3” sounds like it’s trying to simultaneously juggle kittens and hammers, that seems to be the point: It makes an argument for returning to theaters, while also being so vomitously smorgasbordian you’ll need to re-gorge it streaming on Disney+. As I gave up trying to keep track of its many non-hero heroes, non-villain villains, heroes-turned-villains, and villains-turned-heroes, I leaned back to enjoy the sight of a massive alloy-red pyramid ramming into a pirate city in the shape of a cannon-studded skull overrun with hideous arachnid versions of the mutant toys in “Toy Story.” Then I thought of that quote by William Blake: You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.
