Godzilla (1998)

To go on some kind of tangent about how BAD Roland Emerich's 1998 Godzilla movie is would be a pointless exercise.   I can't add much to what countless other internet reviewers (and actual critics) have said about it in the past; it's quite honestly a mess from start to finish, the writing is hackneyed, and everything about Matthew Broderick's acting is just a bit...off.   I've seen it in a theater twice now; once during its initial run when I was about seven years old, and once a few weeks ago when Rifftrax Live! did a theatrical riff on it as part of a Fathom Events special screening.  So instead of picking apart what doesn't work about it, I'll judge it based on how well it holds up as a monster movie, which when you consider the genre, is chock-full of movies that are terrible in quality but are still entertaining in their own way.  It still fails miserably.

The aesthetics of the movie don't feel like a classic Godzilla or Daikaiju film at all; they feel like Independence Day.  When I say the aesthetics, I'm talking about the camerawork, the dialogue, the acting, the special effects, and especially the tone (mixing serious and funny and failing to be either more than sporadically).  One reason that the Godzilla films are fun is because they have a hand-made quality; you know you're watching a man in a monster suit fighting some puppet on twenty strings... but it's charming, in a way.  Charm is the last thing the 1998 film has, and I actually find that same charm to be lacking in Independance Day as well.  I find most all of Emerich's films to be devoid of heart and inspiration; every emotion is hollow and the jokes feel forced.

Often times, the actors in Emerich's movies have the ability to overcome the bad writing and give a good performance, like Jeff Goldblum in ID.  But wow, oh wow, does the opposite happen with Matthew Broderick.  I get what he was going for: nerdy and awkward.  But instead of making the character the likable geek, Broderick plays Nick as if he has autism, which makes laughing at his behavior impossible.  There's a certain over the top acting style that the Japanese actors in Kaiju movies have which helps add to the fun of the movie.  They point and scream and talk very seriously about how this deadly monster that shoots death rainbows out of it's back is going to destroy them all.  The character drama is kept to a minimum, even in the original Godzilla, the most serious-minded movie in the canon.  Here, it's not clear whether or not we're supposed to take these people's character drama seriously.  We need that classic disaster movie "scientist that no one will believe," and what we get is Matthew Broderick just looking absolutely lost.

Some say we look alike...

Hm. I don't see it.

Not only does Emerich's Godzilla want to be Independence Day, it's content to rip off Jurassic Park shamelessly.  No where is this more apparent than in the scene where all of Godzilla's eggs hatch baby Godzillas that look just like velociraptors.  They are such a blatant rip-off of the concept that it's actually a little insulting.  There's a dearth of creativity all over the thing, and the baby Godzilla scenes really go to show that the writers just did not care or weren't given enough time to think of something better.  And yeah...that CGI hasn't aged well at all (on both the babies and the titular Godzilla).

It would have been nice to see a fun little homage to the Japanese icon via either a campy monster movie or an update to the original, dead-serious Godzilla films.   What we get is a film with no heart, integrity, creativity or passion; it exists ONLY to produce a trailer that will get butts in seats for opening weekend, and one of those butts was mine.  I didn't like the film when I was seven, not realizing I was in the majority.  And if you can't get a seven year old to like your monster flick, you've got a serious problem.

2/10

My Cousin Vinny

I haven't seen many of the "Great Courtroom Dramas" of all time, but I've seen enough to know that they can be really interesting, moving, and even significant in the way they represent society as enacted by a jury.  My Cousin Vinny does all of these things while still being a comedy, and that's no easy feat.  It's a comedy with endearing characters, hilarious dialogue, great performances, and a story that gets more interesting the further along the film goes.  It's also one that I'd never seen until about a week ago, and Lord forgive me, for I have sinned.

We are first introduced to the accused; two young guys named Billy (Ralph Macchio) and Stan (Mitchell Whitfield) who are accused of murder after a misunderstanding at an Alabama convenience store.  They're gonna need a lawyer; a cheap one.  Luckily Billy has a lawyer cousin they can get to represent them: the titular Vinny (Joe Pesci).  Vinny and his girlfriend Mona Lisa (Marisa Tomei) stick out like sore thumbs in the rural town of Beechum County, with their thick Brooklyn accents and harsh sense of style.  At first, things appear grim for Billy and Stan as Vinny continually botches up each hearing and the case now must go to trail. Vinny hasn't had any trial experience in the six years since he graduated college, but his natural tendencies to argue intelligently until he gets what he wants might be enough to save Billy and Stan from the death penalty.

The premise for the film is good enough, but to see where writer Dale Launer takes the story becomes so involving, and the comedy is so sharp and on-point, that you're positively on the edge of your seat by the end.  The film even makes legal procedure seem interesting, with Vinny's constant inability to be polite to the judge and respect the dress code getting plenty of milage because of Pesci's performance.  You get the sense that Vinny is never bewildered by the law process, just annoyed by it; he may not understand all the rules, but he's gonna figure this thing out one way or another.

Marisa Tomei famously won an Oscar for her performance, and while she owes a lot of her character's brilliance to the writing (like most Best Actor Oscar winners), she really does a great job of flawlessly embodying the smart girl who just sounds stupid.  Tomei and Pesci have really great chemistry that makes their arguments a joy to listen to, seeing as how they never get into "real" fights, just hilarious bickering that subtly develops them as characters.  When you see Mona Lisa handle herself in an argument about a leaky faucet, she makes up an entire scenario with intricate details in order to get a one-up on Vinny when he asks her if she's sure she turned it off.  While she does this as a joke, it helps establish that she's an even better arguer than Vinny, so her involvement later on in court comes as no surprise.  Also, I have to mention former Munster star Fred Gwynne as the judge, who might be the one holding the gavel, but is always one step behind the other characters.  He never goes full-on villain, which definitely works in the movie's favor, but he's always there as an adversary to keep tensions high.

Something else I love about the movie is how it exposes the falsities of eyewitness accounts.  People misinterpret information, claim they see things when they couldn't have, and don't often think about variables when they "know what they saw."  But Vinny interviews each of them and finds the holes in their reports, and as each one is revealed you get a sense of victory.  You just wanna pull a Macaulay Culkin and yell "YES!" every time, and not because Joe Pesci is lighting his head on fire.

My Cousin Vinny has remained pretty endearing in the years since its 1992 release, and it's easy to see why.  It has a charm to it that's impossible to fake; the characters are all lovable and well developed, and the court case gets more interesting the further into the movie you go.  There's no room for sentiment though; this is a hard-R comedy, probably exclusively because of its f-bomb count, but that only adds some believability to the two Brooklynites.  Having someone from Brooklyn not swearing in every other sentence would be like watching a Mel Brooks movie with no penis jokes; it just wouldn't seem right.  The cherry on top is the chemistry betwen Pesci and Tomei, giving the movie its heart and grounding its humor simultaneously.  I'm not sure I've seen another courtroom comedy quite as satisfying as this, but when the bar is set this high, I guess that's understandable.

10/10

The Lego Movie

When I saw ads for The Lego Movie, I really wasn't too impressed.  It seemed like a pop culture-laden commercial for Legos with a generic story, and in some ways, it is.  The only difference between the film itself and the way I envisioned it is that it's really funny, full of social commentary, and contains a twist that not only makes the movie better; it actually requires you to watch the movie a second time with the twist in mind.  It's sort of like The Sixth Sense of animated kids' movies.

The story follows Emmet, a Lego man living in a world where everything is made of Lego blocks.  He's your everyday, blue collar worker, following instructions that tell him to do not just the things at his construction job, but things in his daily life.  One day, his life is turned upside when he finds out he is "The Special," the one who is destined to save the Lego world from the evil Lord Business and his powerful new weapon known as the Kragle.  He is guided, and often ridiculed, by his new friends Wyldstyle (a badass spy-type girl who wishes she were "The Special") and Vitivirus (a wizard who is an amalgamation of every fantasy wizard with a long white beard ever put to page or screen).

If the plot doesn't interest you, you may have missed the entire joke.  The Lego Movie is a surprisingly sharp parody of the standard hero's journey, and a clear reversal of just about everything that the hero's journey stands for.  Often times, the hero of an epic quest is a pretty bland, every-day sort of guy with no remarkable character traits.  That's exactly what Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt) is; unremarkable and completely ordinary.  Thinking creatively is something he's never done, and that's where the social commentary part of The Lego Movie comes in.

What the film is saying is that people often won't make creative decisions; they usually do things according to the norm and like things that are popular.  The song "Everything is Awesome" beautifully embodies the modern pop song in every way, from its oppressively generic faux-dubstep beat to its subtextual theme about conformity, it's just hilarious.  And come on, admit you do some of the things Emmet does during his morning routine (buying overpriced coffee, routing for the local sports team even if you don't like sports, etc).  It's pretty much a perfectly tongue-in-cheek time capsule for what life is like in the 2010s.

Social commentary is nice, but dammit this is a comedy first and foremost.  It's a comedy made for families, but it's so witty and fast-paced and never talks down to its audience. The voice work from Pratt, Will Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Morgan Freeman, and Liam Neeson is across the board spot-on, without any one voice seeming like it's only there for film to boast, "Hey look! We got celebrities! PRODUCTION VALUE!"  The voices combined with the animation style, a unique CGI technique that resembles stop-motion (and likely fooled a lot of people into thinking that's what it was) adds to the comedy due to the "limitations" of bringing a world made of nothing but Lego blocks to life.

No review would be complete without talking about the third act, the one that takes this good movie and makes it a great one, so for now, this review will remain incomplete.   I'd hate to ruin the interesting and unexpected route the film's story takes, and how it changes everything that happened before it for the better.  It only reinforces the themes the movie establishes, like thinking creatively in a world that is obsessed with normalcy and fitting in, and just plain having fun rather than taking things so damn seriously all the time.  It's definitely one of those rare American animated movies that seems to be made for a general audience, rather than just kids (or worse, stupid kids).  What appears to be just another extended toy commercial reveals itself to be a thoughtful, funny, memorable and awesome movie.

9/10

Rick's Personal Summer Movie Recap

While the summer typically produces Hollywood's most brain dead, effects-driven, franchise-friendly, action movies, I'm a genre guy and I love the summer movie season.  With how much money tickets cost ($13 for a standard ticket in most NYC theaters now), I like going to the movies for the spectacle, the laughs, and the 'splosions.  But I need a good story, characters, and talent to get me through it all, and I saw more than enough of that this summer.  True that there were quite a few disappointments (The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Godzilla), but there were also a few surprises.  Here are five of the best movies I saw this summer; movies that I really liked or even loved, and will likely be getting a spot on my blu-ray shelf sometime soon.  KEEP IN MIND I missed out on 22 Jump Street, A Most Wanted Man, Snowpiercer, and I have yet to see Boyhood, so don't freak out if you think I didn't like them.  I'm assuming you value my opinion, please comment below if I am mistaken.

5.) X-Men: Days of Future Past

Finally! An X-Men movie that lives up to the standards set by the first two films... twelve and fourteen years ago... but whatever.  Seeing Days of Future Past was like getting an apology from your boyfriend after he's been a schizophrenic asshole for a whole decade.  And just as you're out the front door, there he is with chocolates.  It's never too late to say you're sorry.

4.) Edge of Tomorrow

Talk about a surprise.  When I saw the ads for Edge of Tomorrow, I couldn't be more disinterested.  Generic post apocalypse setting, Tom Cruise doing lots of running around, CGI effects, and a story based on the tired cliche that is the Groundhog's Day plot.  But word of mouth was too good to ignore, and I can't tell you how happy I was to see an original, hilarious, and smart story about a man living the same shitty day over and over that goes beyond its gimmick and keeps you guessing--and interested--in what's going to happen next.

3.) Guardians of the Galaxy

I know I've already proclaimed this as being the funniest superhero movie of all time, so I'll try not to gush here.  But holy crap, I just love these characters.  Rocket and Groot are just so charming and well-realized that I just wanna take them home with me.  The human (or human-like) characters have such great comedic timing and chemistry that there's no possible way a sequel could botch it up (KNOCK ON THE HARDEST WOOD YOU CAN FIND RIGHT GODDAMN NOW).  Energetic, perfectly paced, and side-splitting at every turn, you just can't not love this movie.


2.) How to Train Your Dragon 2

I make no secret of the fact that I absolutely love animation, so I was bummed when I looked at the summer movie roster and didn't see a new Pixar movie.  But hey, who needs Pixar when you have Planes: Fire and Rescue? That'll keep those little bastards quiet for an hour and a half while we take shots in the back row every time a new toy flies onscreen.  Well anyway, I didn't know what to expect from How to Train Your Dragon 2, especially with its predecessor being one of Dreamwork's most charming and beautiful movies in their history.  But once again, word of mouth was just so damn good, so I opted for the IMAX experience and got my money's worth for shit sure.  An exhilarating, emotional, funny, and gorgeous experience to behold, Dragon 2 was good enough to give me my Pixar fix for the year.  And I haven't gotten a good Pixar fix since Toy Story 3. 

1.) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Maybe I'm biased, maybe I had high expectations, and maybe it's just that damn good, but I absolutely loved Dawn.  I like Rise a whole lot, and would have been totally satisfied with a sequel that was as good or close to it.  But Dawn is not just the best Apes film to come out since the original 60s adaptation; it's in my top sci-fi films of all time due to its ape characters, visual effects, complex themes about racism, and ANDY FREAKIN' SERKIS, and yeah... that was some really impressive camera work, too.  Until something better comes along, this is my favorite movie of 2014.

Bonus Round:

My pick for the most disappointing movie this summer: Godzilla.  A really effective trailer mislead us into thinking that this was going to be an epic disaster/horror movie, finally doing 21st century justice to one of the most iconic monsters in all world history.  What we get is a character drama without the characters, and actors who are clearly doing too much work to compensate for the fact that they have nothing interesting to work with.  Loved those kaiju fight scenes, just didn't love everything else.

Star Trekking: The Voyage Home

I had actually seen the fourth Star Trek film way back in the day before I'd seen a single episode of the TV show, and even without context, I thought it was a pretty good movie.  There's a lightheartedness about the story, characters, and dialogue that really gives Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home a distinctiveness that separates it from the other films in the series.  If Wrath of Khan was the best Star Trek drama, then The Voyage Home is the best Star Trek comedy.

The Enterprise Crew, now exiled on Vulcan without an Enterprise, are getting ready to make the trip back to Earth using the Klingon Bird of Prey ship, where they will have to face the consequences of their actions in the previous film (if you want a recap, click here).  When they get back to Earth, there is an enormous probe emitting a strange, whale-like sound.  Its presence threatens to destroy the planet if it doesn't get a response.  Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), McCoy (DeForest Kelley), Sulu (George Takei), Scotty (James Doohan), Chekov (Walter Koenig), and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) conclude that they must travel back in time to find and bring back a humpback whale in order to communicate with the probe before it destroys the Earth.

 Once there, in our present day (you know, 1986), their ship has a major engine problem.  Because of course it does. While the rest of the crew fix the issue and get the ship prepared for the whales, Kirk and Spock set out to find them.  They encounter a woman named Dr. Gillian Taylor at the Cetacean Institute in San Francisco, who is in charge of taking care of two humpback whales that were rescued at sea and are now being temporarily sheltered there.  Gillian wants the best for the whales since the institute is going to be releasing them into the wild soon, and she worries that they will be hunted by poachers.  Kirk and Spock have the difficult task of convincing Gillian that they should be the ones to take the whales;  meanwhile the rest of the crew get into trouble of their own.

What I found I liked most about The Voyage Home was the sense of fun the script and cast bring to the forefront. Everyone is so comfortable in their characters that I truly believe the actors could have improvised the entire movie if they had a basic story outline and the result would be just fine.  Bits such as Kirk trying to explain to Gillian that Spock did "a little too much LDS" back in the 60s to explain his weird behavior, or Chekov asking a cop where the naval base is so that can find the "nuclear wessels" are hilarious.  Cold war humor and environmentalism aside, it's a lot great moments featuring the characters just being people, which has been more and more consistent as this series has progressed.  It all makes sense, too: these people were in exile for a few years together and have known each other for over 20 years; it's likely that they've become more comfortable with each other and regard each other more so as friends rather than co-workers.

I liked Gillian, but her character brings about some of my biggest problems with the film.  Much of her dialogue is about the whales and how she feels about them, not so much about her life and what she does besides take care of them.  (SPOILER AHEAD FOR ANYONE WHO DOESN'T WANT A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD MOVIE SPOILED) I suppose it makes her decision to come back to the future with the crew at the end seem more plausable, seeing as how there's NOBODY in her life that she loves or cares about (however unlikely that may seem), but it still would have been nice to see her be sad that she was leaving something behind.  We don't see her really react to being in the future either, which is kind of a letdown since a major theme of the film (and it's greatest source of comedy) is culture clash; we experience the fun of seeing futuristic people in the past, why not let us see some of Gillian's reaction to the future world?  In addition, some of her "save the whales" monologues are just a little too heavy-handed, which took me out of the film once or twice. For Christ's sake, she has an "I Heart Whales" sign on the back of her car. Don't you ever do anything else?

While I loved the character interactions, something else that caught my attention was the stunning visual effects.  I'm not talking flashy space battles or breakthroughs in CGI; I'm talking about those gorgeously-realized, animatronic humpback whales.  Whether it's 1986 or 2086, those whales look fantastic, and hats off to the effects team for pulling it off.  ILM's effects of ocean water evaporating? Less impressive, but it's not distractingly bad.  Meanwhile, Leonard Rosenman gives the film a whimsical orchestral score, but doesn't come close to providing a really great theme the way that Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner did with the earlier films.

Leonard Nimoy returns to direct, and he seems much more comfortable in the position than he did when he directed The Search for Spock.  While that film had a silly premise that tended to take itself seriously with bits of humor injected,  The Voyage Home knows what it wants to be (a comedy), and sticks to that idea throughout.  There's no big bad villain and no forced dramatic moments that might drag the film down; it's light and well paced, making its two-hour runtime feel like half that length.  What Nimoy (and the screenwriters) are great at doing is incorporating the whole cast into the films as opposed to limiting the cast members besides Shatner, McCoy, and Nimoy to background roles, like they had the tendency to be in the first two films.  In addition, while the script may be a bit self-referential, it never goes into full-on parody (which would have most likely ruined the film).

Even though the original series had several episodes where the Enterprise travelled back in time, I was never really thrilled with the results.  The Voyage Home fulfills that desire that I think most fans of anything have deep down; to see their fantasy or sci-fi heros in the "real" world.  The idea was great and the execution was even better; a comedic Star Trek that's legitimately funny, despite a few heavy-handed messages.  Not only a good Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home is accessible to any casual filmgoer who's in the mood for a light-hearted comedy, and that's not something a lot of sci-fi film franchises (let alone their fourth installments) can claim.

8/10

Transformers: Age of Extinction

If the Transformers franchise has proved anything, it's that nostalgia sells.  It sells big time.  With a new Ninja Turtles movie recently released, and a Jem and the Holograms AND new Power Rangers movie in the works, it's safe to say that children of the 80s and 90s are going to be milked for all their warm and fuzzy feelings for their cheesy saturday morning shows for at least the next decade.  We all know a live-action Pokemon movie is inevitable.

It's interesting that the bafflingly successful Transformers franchise started this trend, despite the fact that the films themselves often don't reflect the tone of the original series or anything resembling an 80s cartoon.  I guarantee that some of the biggest fans of the movies are people who didn't even grow up with the show, i.e. kids and teens of today.  There's fun to be had with the explosions, action scenes, and special effects, but I've found the Transformers franchise to be increasingly shallow and empty.  I did like the first film when it came out, and while I don't think that the sequel was, as Roger Ebert described, "a horrible experience of unbearable length," but it definitely wasn't as good.  I didn't even bother with the third film, as it seemed just as bloated and empty as the first sequel.

Now we come to this; the third sequel and a mini-reboot of the franchise featuring different human characters.  Instead of Shia LeBeouf and his Hot Girl of the Day, we get Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeagar, an overly-optimistic inventor living on a farm in Texas, and his daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz).  Cade and his best friend Lucas (T.J. Miller) discover an old pick-up truck with the intention of selling it for parts, but everything changes when Cade realizes that this truck is no truck; it's Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots.  Meanwhile, Joshua Joyce (the hilariously over-qualified Stanley Tucci), the C.E.O. of a corrupt corporation, has made a breakthrough in weapons technology thanks to a metal called (groan) Transformium.  He plans on using it to create his own transformers, which proves deadly enough for Optimus and a group of other Transformers (who surprisingly have distinct personalities) to try and stop him with the help of Cade, Tessa, and her boyfriend Shane (Jack Reynor).

That basic outline would barely fill a 90-minute movie, let alone the film's true runtime of nearly three hours.  The opening bits with Cade, Tessa, and Lucas are so hollow and laughably cliche that I don't even see why they bothered with it.  Lucas is a horrible character, with his creepy fixation on how "hot" Tessa is (despite the fact that she's 17 and he's pushing 40), his clunky and aggressively unfunny jokes, and an air of annoyance that rivals two Jar Jar Binkses. (MINOR SPOILER) Let's just say that I literally cheered in the theater when I found out he would only be a main character in the first act.

Joshua Joyce is easily the best of the bunch, with Tucci giving a good performance and his character experiencing a (gasp!) CHARACTER ARC.  Every other character goes through hollow changes like Cade trusting Tessa to date Lucas or Optimus learning that "all humans are not so bad," but wow does none of it matter.  But you know what kind of movie this is when Cade being able to "throw a football real good" becomes a plot point.  The action is laughably over-the-top, the CGI is hit-or-miss, the comedy is awful, and the plot is so tension-free that it actually becomes boring.  If there's one thing you want your movie about giant, fighting, transforming robots to be, it's anything but boring.  Oh, and did I mention Kelsey Grammer was in this? He's in this.  He's the bad guy who does bad things.

I will say this though, the thing is shot beautifully.  From an opening in a prehistoric world that glides over gorgeous mountains to arial shots of cities (both in China and in the U.S.), Michael Bay and director of photography Amir Mokri, who also shot last year's Man of Steel, do a terrific job of capturing great angles and delivering on dynamic action set pieces.  Unlike Steel though, Age of Extinction is bright, colorful, vibrant, and most importantly, doesn't resort to shaky-cam for its action scenes.  I saw this in IMAX 3D, and that is truly the only way to go (if you must).  The open spaces, the swirling camera movements, and the grand-scale action are a lot of fun to experience on the big screen.  It's sort of like going to a Universal 3D theme park ride; there's no real story, it's just sort of fun to watch.

If only the fourth Transformers movie had been a theme park ride, I'm sure I would have liked it a hell of a lot more.  But at almost three fucking hours, and that's unforgivable.  In addition, I was pretty turned off by all the misogyny on display; women in this film are objects, and not one of them is even the slightest bit unattractive.  Two women walking by on the street apparently think it's cute when the despicable Lucas whistles at them and checks them out.  Was that supposed to be funny?  Was any of this movie supposed to be funny?  I was pretty much done with it by the two hour mark, and not all the giant robot dinosaurs in the world could have gotten me back into it. And I love giant robot dinosaurs.

3/10

Guardians of the Galaxy

When Batman Begins--and more importantly, The Dark Knight--came around, superhero films had license to be dark and brooding, gritty and realistic. Thankfully, the Marvel Studios have managed to find a fairly consistent tone that mixes darkness and humor in a satisfying way; in other words, they're a hell of a lot of fun. While I stand by my opinion that the first Iron Man is the best of these films, one of the funniest superhero films of all time might just be Guardians of the Galaxy. Unlike most films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this one plays by its own rules.

That's not to say that Guardians doesn't have some serious moments, but at heart, it's a comedy. An amazingly big-budgeted comedy with lots and lots of death, violence, and action… but a comedy nonetheless. We are first introduced to Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) as a young boy going through a rather traumatic experience involving his sick mother. During the worst possible moment, he is abducted by aliens, and we fast-forward a few decades. Now calling himself Star Lord (what better name for an '80s kid's space outlaw fantasy hero?), but failing to acquire the infamy he would like to aspire to, Peter finds himself being assaulted by numerous aliens after stealing a very powerful MacGuffin orb. Among the aliens who get mixed up in Peter’s quest to keep the orb out of deadly hands is a bounty hunting raccoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and his muscle, a tree alien named Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), as well as an assassin named Gamora (Zoey Saldona) and a revenge-seeking juggernaut named Drax (Dave Bautista). 

While the story may be simplistic, the characters sure as hell aren’t. Each of the so-called Guardians is given a distinct personality, and each actor fits their role perfectly. Chris Pratt may have emerged as a true star with this movie, carrying the film with confidence, spot-on comedic timing, and genuine emotion. “Starlord” is such a fun character, and while he’s selfish and cocky, he’s never unlikable. There’s not a moment he’s onscreen where he doesn’t look like he’s having fun.

While CGI characters can sometimes be a distraction, Rocket and Groot never stick out for a second among their live-action costars. In fact, they might have been my favorite characters in the whole film. Rocket is a pyromaniac genius, the results of laboratory experiments on an Earth raccoon. His foul-mouthed dialogue had me rolling, and his animation blends fantastically with the reality of the other characters. Groot’s constant switching from a naive picture of innocence to badass bodyguard is hilarious, and his design is just brilliant. You might think that because his only dialogue only consists of “I am Groot” that he would get tiring, but it’s somehow funny every time. Both Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel give great performances and inject their characters with tons of charm.

Drax is an unexpectedly great character as well. The writing must be given special credit for not turning him into a cliché, revenge-seeking character. In fact, the way it plays out seems to be more of a parody of that cliché, always injecting humor into scenes that you thought were being played straight at first. His schtick is that people from his planet don't understand sarcasm, which is a small problem when you hang out with people that do few other things than dish out sarcastic one-liners. Bautista not only looks the part, but he plays it without flaw. I honestly don’t know how this wrestler/actor got through some of his lines without laughing (and same goes for the rest of the cast). 

Gamora has a great, green-skinned look, but her character isn’t quite as well-drawn as the rest of them. A daughter of the Big Bad of the movie, she decides to betray him and keep him from getting the MacGuffin orb. Her personality is not consistent; sometimes she jokes around with the other characters and other times she’s just as laughably serious as Drax. Don’t get me wrong; Saldona is great in the role, adding another great sci-fi performance to her resume alongside Avatar’s Netiri and Star Trek’s Uhura. However, given that she’s the only female on the team, it would have been nice to have her character be a bit more distinct.

Facing the same problem to a much larger degree is the villain set, who are honestly a bunch of generic bad guys with hardly any depth or backstory. It only stands out so prominently because of the excellent characters that surround them, mostly reciting dialogue that exposits about the plot (which doesn’t take itself seriously enough for the audience to really care about). There are rare moments when they actually feel threatening, and that’s down to the actors and the fantastic make-up jobs on all of them. In the grand scheme of things, it’s a minor issue.

The pacing, the visuals, the music, and the action all help sell the film as well, keeping things moving and never dragging its feet for a forced sentimental moment. The sound design is immersive, the writing is sharp and hilarious, and the cinematography doesn’t push for the shaky-cam crap that clutters up so many modern action movies (including the recent Captain America movie). Although CGI is used heavily, there are a good number of effects that utilize make-up, animatronics, and real sets that help the film’s world look lived-in rather than sterile. The soundtrack is also littered with great pop songs of the 70s and 80s courtesy of Starlord’s walkman, which provides some of the film's best montages and laughs, though the orchestral score fails to deliver a memorable theme. 

Director James Gunn clearly has a knack for this kind of thing, and I’d love to see him direct the sequel (which I was just craving by the end of this).  I’ve seen the film twice now, but I didn’t really see it until I experienced the IMAX 3D (actually the Grauman's Chinese theater, the most beautiful theater I've ever seen (and I refuse to call it the newly-named TCL Chinese Theater, just in case you thought I didn't know)). It’s the funniest superhero (or really, super anti-hero) movie I’ve ever seen, and comparing it to the other Marvel movies in the canon (I guess you could call it The Avengers saga), this is one ranks highly. Unlike those films, however, the film has a charm and sense of humor all its own, making it stand tall among the crowded field that is the superhero genre.

9/10